The Internationalization of Borealis: A Focus on Sustainability

Presentation material for Dataverse Community Meeting 2026. 

Since 2016, Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse repository, has been advancing a bilingual research data repository offered in Canada’s two official languages, French and English. Building on early efforts by the Dataverse internationalization group to support multilingual platforms, Borealis has scaled its services to include bilingual user support, monthly community meetings conducted in both French and English, and bilingual documentation and guides. Borealis also contributes Canadian French code to the broader Dataverse community in support of open data practices. More recently, the focus has shifted toward ensuring the sustainability of these bilingual efforts by reviewing existing workflows, implementing improvements, and integrating new tools and processes to support the long-term maintenance of bilingual infrastructure and services. 

This presentation and poster highlight the international outlook of multilingualism of the Dataverse infrastructure, showcases a Translation tool shared with the community to facilitate the complex translation process, and highlights the need for more international collaboration in continuation of the internationalization work that has been ongoing for the last decade.