Background:

Cochrane approved a translation strategy in 2014 with the aim of increasing the capacity and providing central coordination for sustainable Cochrane translation activities in a broad range of languages. The translation strategy contributes to strategic goals 2 and 3: 'Making our evidence accessible'; and 'Advocating for evidence'.

Objectives:

To describe the main components of Cochrane's translation strategy, and to show what impact it has made to date on translation and related activities.

Methods:

The analysis will consist of the collection of metrics as well as a brief quantitative and qualitative survey with our language project managers, and will investigate the following aspects:
- the number of languages we are translating into, and their importance on the global linguistic landscape;
- how much and what content has been translated;
- how many people are involved in translations, and in what capacity;
- how much and what type of resources the projects have;
- how productive the projects are;
- how sustainable the projects are;
- how translations may have led to local outreach and dissemination activities;
- how translations may have led to a local increase of interest in Cochrane (e.g. access to our content, media coverage);
- whether translations may have led to new funding or partnerships.
Retrospective comparison data will be provided where possible.

Results:

The results from the analysis will be available for the Colloquium. As of March 2015, we have published more than 12,000 translations of Cochrane summaries across 12 different languages. The majority of our translation teams rely on low resources and volunteers. Most new projects require several months to prepare and then reach a certain continuity, and a number of teams have successfully reached this point even without any dedicated funding.

Conclusions:

While the implementation of the translation strategy is still at its early stages, increase in production, languages and access already suggests that our approach has a lot of potential to increase our capacities even in low resource settings, and with relatively low central investment.