GBIF speaks Polish

Leveraging the efforts of dozens of students and staff from the University of Warsaw (UW) who participated in two volunteer translation events last year, GBIF Poland has completed translations making Polish the eleventh language supported on GBIF.org.

Between the time of a translation marathon in June 2024 and a translation hackathon in December 2024, volunteers drawn from both UW's Biology and Modern Languages faculties translated nearly 38,000 words from English to Polish. These gobstopping results benefited from a collective, community-based approach, according to the events' coordinator, given the demands for precision and accuracy with technical and scientific terms related to biodiversity data.

"When we discovered that students from both faculties were taking Wojtek Kasprzak's field class to learn English vocabulary on plants, fungi, and animals, we thought to offer them more opportunities, but we didn’t know what to expect," Julia Pawłowska, deputy head of the UW's Institute of Evolutionary Biology and a GBIF open biodiversity data ambassador. "The students who participated in the first event encouraged us to hold the second, which exceeded our wildest expectations by doubling the number of people involved."

Dedicated volunteers from around the globe have completed nearly all translations overseen by the GBIF Secretariat in recent years, aided and enabled by a free open-source licence from the translation management platform Crowdin. An independent report published by Deloitte Access Economics in 2023 called out the estimated value of translation and other uncompensated activities across the GBIF network as nearly €1 million annually. At market rates, the economic value of these recent efforts is worth thousands of euros—though, for the volunteers, its benefits extends well beyond financial considerations.

"For me, with the threat of climate changes looming over every single one of us, it is especially important to use whatever skills one has to help educate people and make biodiversity data accessible to everyone, regardless of the language and nationality," said Maria Czubaty, a recent master's graduate from UW's Institute of English Studies. "Whether you specialize in languages, humanities or science, volunteering as a translator makes you part of global efforts to better understand our planet—and translating the GBIF page into Polish was very fun!"

As one of GBIF's founding national members, Poland has participated in the network since 2001. Established in 2003 and hosted at UW, GBIF Poland node has played an active role in promoting data mobilization and use, both nationally and abroad, and the Polish Biodiversity Information Network (Krajowa Sieć Informacji o Bioróżnorodności, or KSIB) that it created includes most of the country’s scientific institutions dealing with biodiversity. The addition of the new Polish translations actually represents a reintroduction, as a much-earlier version of the GBIF website included Polish.

"I’m very grateful to Julia, the Polish node team and all the volunteers—especially non-biologists—who have enabled us to act after years of talking and build on modern tools and practices for supporting translation," said Piotr Tykarski, assistant professor in the UW Institute of Ecology, who serves in dual capacity as head of delegation and node manager for GBIF Poland. "This experience confirms the importance of finding the right people, seizing favorable circumstances and reaching beyond the horizon of their specialization."

In recent years, KSIB member institutions have generated five large digitization projects under the government’s Digital Poland Operational Programme. The projects have generated a massive increase of species occurrences from Polish institutions through GBIF, rising from less than two million records in 2022 to nearly 16 million today. An additional breakthrough was connected with successful funding of activities of the Polish Node and KSIB partners, that lead to the launch of a programme of consolidation and networking activities, including GBIF-oriented workshops, trainings for data managers, development of databases and web applications, and creation of the Digital Catalogue of Biodiversity of Poland.

GBIF Poland has also secured funding through Capacity Enhancement Support Programme to lead a collaboration involving several GBIF nodes and data publishers from Europe. The AI for Specimen Labels project will seek to develop a machine-based annotation service capable of transcribing and mobilizing label information from natural history collections in bulk, aligned with Massive Annotation Services developed for the DiSSCo infrastructure.

Most recently, KSIB became a pilot adopter of the GBIF Metabarcoding Data Programme, enabling UW PhD candidate Alicja Okrasińska and colleagues to publish a dataset of fungi from post-industrial soils that is only the second prepared and shared using the Metabarcoding Data Toolkit.

Chcesz się zaangażować?

Want to get involved and join Maria and dozens more GBIF's translators? These volunteers work across five official UN languages (Arabic, Simplified Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish) as well as Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and Ukrainian (with Czech to follow shortly), and others are welcome to signal their interest by completing the GBIF volunteer form.