The PC(USA)’s new website begins to share information in Korean and Spanish
Global Language Resources leads the way to broaden the impact of pcusa.org
LOUISVILLE — pcusa.org, the recently redesigned denominational website of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), has two brand-new features: accessibility to Korean- and Spanish-speaking Presbyterians and, for that matter, to non-Presbyterians as well. The first translated pages were made available to the public Wednesday evening.
People who want to view website content in any of those three languages can click a toggle in the top-right corner of website pages, said Fred Tangeman, the PC(USA)’s website content manager and member of the Website Ministry Team.
“The vision is to have three simultaneous sites with information in each language, with visitors getting the same information on the Korean- or Spanish-language sites they get on the English-language site,” Tangeman said. The new pcusa.org will also feature content that originates in languages other than English.
Global Language Resources has been hard at work localizing the top levels of the website that are now available to the public, including the pages one can click to from all-capital-letter links at the top of most screens on the English and Spanish sites, the home page, and the three “pillar pages” featured in circles on the home page.
“We are committed as a denomination to having a language access plan,” said Stephanie Vasquez, manager of Global Language Resources. “This is a more robust plan to have the website pages available.”
“It is not the end. It is really the beginning,” said Vasquez of the work her team has done so far. GLR has been preparing for the launch for more than a year. “It is like the Reformation. The website has been reformed and will always be reforming.”
“We have been meeting with our client partners — especially our bilingual Korean and Spanish speaking stakeholders,” Vasquez said. “From the beginning, the challenges arose because all parties were uncertain about what the process would involve.”
Throughout 2025, GLR and others will keep an eye on the resources that prove to be the most downloaded and visited by Spanish- and Korean-language speaking constituents.
“By leveraging data from views and downloads of the new PC(USA) webpages, we can identify which resources are most popular. This data will guide me to concentrate our efforts on the materials that users are downloading frequently, rather than relying solely on requests for all content. Understanding these trends is crucial for optimizing our resources, providing guidance to our colleagues within ministry areas and covering the needs of our constituents,” Vasquez said.
“We will be monitoring how the translated pages are landing with different communities,” Tangeman said, so that the Website Ministry Team maintaining the website can “share translations that work best for the entire church.”
Now that the three versions of the site have been activated, the next step will be to translate pages that are beyond what Tangeman called the “level 3 pages” (those pages accessed via all-capital words at the top of website screens). That work is ongoing. News of additional translations will be shared as new page levels are completed.
“It took a long time to integrate” the thousands of pages provided by dozens of PC(USA) ministry areas into the new site, Tangeman said. “But now that our processes are ironed out, the work of sharing translations should be much quicker.” At some point, “all the menus and pages across the site will be translated.”
Tangeman credited Global Language Resources for “helping us figure out how the Drupal CMS [content management system] will work.” The GLR Team “had to be in Drupal in ways they haven’t in the past with the church’s websites,” he said. “Stephanie and the GLR Team deserve a lot of credit for how flexible they have been, including working on segments multiple times as we collaborated with our developer friends in APAX Software to finalize the site’s localization features.”
Tangeman said he hopes people using pcusa.org will “realize this is just a start” as they begin engaging with the Spanish- and Korean-language content currently available. “We will work to provide more resources and news in Spanish and Korean in the coming weeks and months,” he said, “and use the interconnected three sites to maximize sharing.”
The website’s helpdesk can be accessed by clicking the blue button in the lower righthand corner of the homepage and other pages. “We will use helpdesk feedback as we move forward with translations and everything else about the new site,” Tangeman said.
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