The Niche foreign language outreach program: 2.5 million reads

There was a time when The Niche was just about the only stem cell blog or even stem cell-dedicated website more generally across the globe.

I realized early on that I needed to reach people who don’t speak English or for whom English is not their first language. This goal was crucial for effective educational outreach. It became even more important as we have seen unproven clinics preying on vulnerable people all across the globe.

To address this gap, I came up with the idea for the Stem Cell Outreach Program for Education or SCOPE. The plan was to work with a group of volunteer translators. Our team would make a stem cell white paper of key information available in as many languages as possible.

How well would this work?

The Niche stem cells SCOPE
The Niche stem cells SCOPE program languages, randomly arranged.

SCOPE from The Niche gets across 2.5 million landmark

Maybe we’d get to a dozen languages? It has gone surprisingly well.

SCOPE is now available in 35 languages.

Thanks again to the many translators who helped with this project. Most but not all were scientists.

Some pages are particularly popular, including the What are Stem Cells? in Spanish page, which is nearing 700,000 reads. The page in Indonesian has been very popular in recent years and has more than 300,000 reads.

Overall, when I recently counted up the reads for all the SCOPE pages, they totaled more than 2.5 million. I thought we were more around just over 1 million.

In some ways, one might argue that SCOPE has been the biggest positive impact of The Niche.

It gets complicated

Many sites including some bad ones have gotten in on going beyond English. Some stem cell clinics and promotion sites that get paid by clinics provide stem cell-related material in a variety of languages now. Whatever they can do to get paying customers in the door it seems.

On the other hand, I’m glad to see many good citizen organizations have stem cell-related content in numerous languages.

If you don’t see a certain language available on SCOPE and you are fluent in it plus willing to act as a translator, please reach out to me.

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