The Spanish Embassy in Cairo invited the Spanish language departments in various Egyptian universities to work together on an educational digital project on the Wikipedia platform, with the main goal of reducing the gender gap.
The Embassy revealed in a press statement that although the digital encyclopedia contains about 1.7 million resumes, the embassy found out that the percentage of women only does not exceed 20%, and this gap affects the quantity as well as the quality of written content about prominent cultural women figures in each country.
Hence, in the context of the celebrations of Women’s Month that take place between February and March 2022, the Spanish Embassy in Cairo worked in cooperation with the Cervantes Institute and the Spanish Language Departments at Al-Azhar Universities, Badr, Cairo, Helwan, Luxor and Zagazig to present the aforementioned translation project in order to support the identification of Spanish and Egyptian women whose biographical information is not enough in this digital encyclopedia.
In this context, students of the Spanish language departments in Egypt learned, for a whole month, how to edit and write the pages of the Wikipedia platform in order to include and enrich the pages of the digital encyclopedia with more information about important female figures in Egypt and Spain. Biographies of various female personalities have been selected to cover different fields of knowledge. The project includes leading figures in the fields of literature, singing, art and activists from both countries. Then, the biographical content of the Egyptian female personalities was translated into Spanish and similarly the biographical content of the Spanish female personalities was translated into Arabic. So far, the embassy said that 90 people have participated in this project. They worked to enrich and translate the biographical content of 65 female personalities (36 Spanish personalities and 29 Egyptian personalities).
Students and professors of the Spanish language in Egyptian universities participated in the project in supporting the introduction of prominent women figures from Spain and Egypt, and at the same time, they acquired digital skills that help them learn, publish scientifically and create important content on the Internet in both Spanish and Arabic.
Last but not least, the students presented a series of video clips in which they showed a summary of 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.
