Translation and Accessibility
Translation
When Human Rights Watch researcher Zama Coursen-Neff met with the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics in 2001 to deliver her report, she found the staff had already downloaded the summary and recommendations in Hebrew from the HRW Web site. Rather than starting from scratch, the meeting could proceed apace.
In addition to facilitating campaigning across borders, any campaign committed to political pluralism should incorporate translation.
While automatic software translation is poor, content management software can help facilitate the management of translations by staff and/or volunteers.
Google has the largest network of translators in the world, combining staff management with translation tracking software and an enormous network of volunteers to translate its interface messages and documentation.
Sites with self-governing translation networks include Indymedia and Wikipedia. Both sites feature open access for users to submit translations of articles, relying on a critical mass of users to vet the quality of translations. See Wikipedia’s multilingual statistics page to view the breathtaking number of languages they support.
Depending on your Web site content management system, one can incorporate free software libraries to manage remote translation of text into multiple languages.
Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, regularly posts summaries in English of Arabic language news reports on his blog. His commentary has become a popular source of information about the war in Iraq. In February 2004, he announced a project to translate classics of American thought and literature into Arabic, and to subsidize their publication and distribution. “The project will begin with a selected set of passages and essays by Thomas Jefferson on constitutional and governmental issues such as freedom of religion, the separation of powers, inalienable rights, the sovereignty of the people, and so forth.” [source]
And, as in the case of the Dai in southwest China, software tools are making minority languages easier to preserve.
Again, however, tools are not a panacea or substitute for the time and labor necessary to produce quality translations. They merely facilitate and decentralize the process.
Accessibility
Organizations promoting political pluralism should consider the accessibility of their Web pages. This is not just a matter of content, but of coding.
People who benefit from accessible design may be blind or partially sighted, unable to use a mouse, or color blind. The very young and very old may also have difficulty using a mouse or reading the screen.
Web page authors can use specific coding techniques and design principles to make Web content accessible to persons who use assistive devices to browse the Web. These techniques also make Web pages more accessible across a variety of platforms and Web browsers including voice browsers, screen magnifiers, mobile phones, or older desktop computers with low-resolution screens.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a set of guidelines developed by the World Wide Web Consortium to for building accessibile Web sites. The guidelines constitute a list of 14 concepts, broken into checkpoints and priorities. Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines explains how to implement each guideline.
The U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines list coding guidelines required by Federal agencies when producing Web pages.
In 1998, the U.S. Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Section 508 “was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals.”
Organizations in the U.S. have successfully brought lawsuits against consumer and financial services corporations for failing to design their sites in an accessible format.
Since 1998, the Web Standards Project, an international and informal movement of designers and Web coders, has actively promoted standards compliant Web code.
Last modified on January 19, 2006 6:32 PM