Spanish Embassy fights gender gap with translation

Spanish language departments at various local universities have co-operated with the Spanish Embassy in Cairo on an educational digital project on Wikipedia.
The project, the embassy said, aims to reduce gender gaps in Egypt.
It added in a statement that Wikipedia contains around 1.7 million resumes.
Nonetheless, women’s resumes do not exceed 20%, the embassy said.
It added that this gap affects the quantity as well as the quality of written content about prominent cultural women figures in each country.
The embassy noted that it co-operated with the Cervantes Institute and Spanish language departments at the universities of al-Azhar, Badr, Cairo, Helwan, Luxor and Zagazig in presenting the aforementioned translation project.
This work, it added, comes in the context of Women Month celebrations that take place between February and March 2022.
The project, it added, aims to promote knowledge about Spanish and Egyptian female figures.
“There are not sufficient presentations of these women’s resumes in this digital encyclopedia,” the embassy said.
It noted that Spanish language departments’ students learned, for a whole month, how to edit and write the pages of the Wikipedia platform with the aim of enriching it with more information about important female figures in Egypt and Spain.
It added that the biographies of various female figures were chosen to cover various fields of knowledge.
It said the project includes leading figures in the fields of literature, singing, and art, along with activists from both countries.
It added that the content of the biographies of Egyptian women figures was translated into Spanish.
The content of the biographies of Spanish women figures was translated into Arabic too, the embassy said.
It revealed that 90 people participated in this project.
They, it added, worked to enrich and translate the biographical content of 65 female personalities (36 Spanish personalities and 29 Egyptian personalities).
Spanish language students and professors at Egyptian universities participated in the project.
They acquired digital skills that help them learn, publish scientifically and create important content on the Internet, in both Spanish and Arabic, the embassy said.
It added that the students also presented a series of video tapes, in which they showed a summary of the biographies of the creatively selected female characters.
The high quality and distinction of these tapes will help define and maximize the positive impact of women’s leadership and women’s empowerment in Egypt and Spain, the embassy noted.