How do four people set out to change the world and stop a pandemic?

"Our mission,” says Richard Averitt, COO of The Well Project (www.thewellproject.org) “is to change the course of the AIDS pandemic through a unique and comprehensive focus on women worldwide.”

A tall order for an organization of just four full-time members plus a crew of contract writers and editors, but they are totally serious and have a clear vision of how they need to proceed.

In its 25-year burn through the human population so far, HIV has killed 25 million victims. And despite the development of 25 drugs effective at controlling the disease so far, that kill rate is growing. Last year 3 million died and 5 million new victims were infected. "If we do not reverse the steady increase in infections worldwide, we are heading toward a global catastrophe that the world will be unable to handle," Averitt says.

AIDS should be easy to stop. It can only spread by direct exchange of bodily fluids. Two-thirds of all new infections are the result of unprotected sex, and despite its image in the United States as a disease of male homosexuals, most of that intercourse is heterosexual. And sexual transmission is 98% preventable with the comprehensive use of condoms. Yet despite that and the heavy emphasis on abstinence by several of the world's major religions and the U.S. government, it continues to spread worldwide.

Item 1: Identify the barriers

“We have identified three major barriers currently to beginning to win the battle against AIDS,” Averitt says:

• Women make up half of all global infections and more than half of new infections. Because they are usually the caretakers and managers of healthcare, their infections render their entire families vulnerable, and too often that includes an unborn child. “Yet we have very little research on AIDS in women -- how the disease progression differs, how drugs impact women differently. Very few women are in the clinical trials.”
• Many communities lack resources to buy drugs or get information. Often these communities promote transactional sex, and most of them have barriers to women advocating for themselves at the local and national political levels.
• In most of the world, including many areas in the United States, they and their families have no access to information on managing all aspects of living as a woman with AIDS.

Items 2 and 3: Articulate a strong vision and pick a starting point

The Well Project web portal is focused primarily on answering this last major need.. Its concept is to facilitate the growth of interactive communities of women with AIDS. The Project provides the latest globally relevant basic science information in a non-technical form understandable by normal people. But it also encourages the members of these communities to create their own content about their issues in their specific social and cultural situations, what resources are available, how to work around barriers, how to care for themselves and their families.

Initially TWP  has focused on English-speaking women in the United States because that community is most accessible to it. However, its vision is multicultural and multi-linguistic. Recently it has expanded to reach Spanish-speaking women in the United States, with the help of Lionbridge (www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge), a leader in Web localization and translation services.

"Our vision is of online communities around the world posting information in their own languages," says Averitt. "Some of that information will be purely of local interest, some will be regional, and some will be universal. We will manage all those documents, translate them, distribute them to appropriate communities, update them and, when they outlive their relevance, remove them."

Item 4: Leverage advanced technology wherever appropriate

Doing all that in multiple languages for communities of women worldwide, from many social classes in many different societies, is a daunting task. AIDS information changes daily, and the Project's staff makes daily changes to its Web site. This is complex enough in one language. Each new language adds another layer of complexity. And as the site gains increasing numbers of communities, each with its own unique list of documents, this becomes infinitely more complex as each document has to be tracked and updated in each of its instances in different languages.

"We realized very early that as we grow we will eventually either need a high degree of automation or a huge staff of editors," Averitt says. "So we made an early commitment to Documentum, which was something of an act of faith before the introduction of the semi-affordable OEM version. But we realized that we would either succeed or not, and if we did we would need this level of automation."

The choice of Lionbridge to an extent was a logical result of the commitment to Documentum.   "Lionbridge has the technology to leverage our investment in Documentum without requiring a huge staff to track content as it comes in and moves through the workflow, maintain parent-child relationships, change content in multiple languages, identify when it needs to be replaced, etc."

Lionbridge's Freeway software constantly polls Documentum to respond to change orders. For instance, when the document manager identifies a document that needs to be translated, she checks off the languages it should be translated into on a checklist in Documentum. Freeway picks that up and imports the document into Lionbridge’s workflow. When the translations are complete, the translated documents go back into Documentum at The Well Project to continue through its workflow to publication on the Web site.

Item 5: Control costs

Cost is another reason the Well Project chose Lionbridge. "Most companies require that you buy significant software components and acquire your own translation memory, etc.,” says Averitt. “There are pros and cons to that, but we don't have a staff that can manage that kind of software, and as a small nonprofit we would have trouble affording it. With Lionbridge we can use their free plug-in, Freeway."

Item 6: Think ahead

Averitt offers two pieces of advice for other organizations planning localization into multiple languages:

1. Don't solve today's problem of translating into a second language without thinking both about the issue of managing the document life cycle in both languages and what happens when you add a third, fourth, or tenth language. "It would have been very easy to hire some AIDS-knowledgeable editors to translate our documents into Spanish. But the day after they are published they would need to be changed, and the science is moving so fast that in a couple of weeks they would be obsolete. How would we handle that level of turnover manually with 10 languages?"
2. Evaluate the total cost of managing the documents over their lifetime, not just up-front costs. "There are various pricing models, and the tendency is to want to look at the price per word for translation. But that is only part of the total cost, and saving money up front while building cost into managing the documents over time can be a costly mistake.

"We went with the best with Documentum and Lionbridge,’ Averitt says, “but in the end it will save us money because it will allow us to remain a small, fast-moving organization while continuing to deliver the latest information our communities need."