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Information Architecture, Interaction Design, User Experience Design, Visual Design
Translation on the Web: Commonplace, Participatory, and Expected? May 14th, 2010
Above : “A Sampling of Chinglish” courtesy of The New York Times
On The Media is a favorite radio program of mine. Its hosts frequently present interesting takes on “new media” and recently, they had a fascinating segment on translation issues on the Internet. With only 27% of Internet users using English, it’s becoming unreasonable to expect English to be the default Internet language. To avoid the siloing that could occur along linguistic lines, innovative Web sites with an international or multilingual audience are experimenting with machine and human translation. (The importance of getting translation right should not be underestimated, as the images in a recent New York Times slideshow demonstrate.) Ethan Zuckerman, cofounder of the multilingual blog network, Global Voices, tells On The Media, “Translation is going to go from esoteric, rare, and expensive to becoming fairly commonplace, participatory, and expected.”
So, what does this all mean for information architecture and Web design? Dealing with content in different languages and incorporating translation into Web sites present us with new challenges. The On The Media piece offers Meedan as a new model for fostering conversations about current events across languages. Meedan combines machine and human translation to present news and comments in both Arabic and English. The traditional way of presenting more than one language on a Web site is to have the user select their language and then see only that language. Meedan, on the other hand, presents the Arabic alongside the English with clear visual cues for what has been translated: if English appears on a gray background, it has been translated; if it appears on a white background, it was originally written in English. These visual cues act as reminders that you’re interacting with content and people from a different worldview. In this way, cross-language and cross-cultural conversations are taking place.
If we want the Internet to remain a great playground of discovery and exploration, translation (of high quality) on Web sites will have to play a larger role in making content accessible to everyone. It’s time to begin thinking about what this means for user experience design.
3 Comments for "Translation on the Web: Commonplace, Participatory, and Expected?"
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Excellent excellent point. The idea of making online content available in multiple languages has as much to do with accessibility of information as using an appealing and useful information architecture for a website. I suppose this means that information architects and all those whose work falls within this domain should be willing to do more than just simple translate their labels. In actuality, language goes deeper than words as it transmits ideas and concepts that are mired in each culture’s system of thought. Perhaps we have to start thinking about making a site’s content architecture flexible enough to shift between various systems of organization that fit the cultural differences modeled into each language. While we might stick “coffee” under “beverages” in one culture, it might simply fall directly under “breakfast” elsewhere.
Sammy Franklin on May 14th, 2010 at 10:29 am
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Thanks for this concise statement on why these issues are important and showing how productive headway in advancing linguistic access is already being made.
francisca Goldsmith on May 14th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
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Just want to say what a great blog you got here!
I’ve been around for quite a lot of time, but finally decided to show my appreciation of your work!Thumbs up, and keep it going!
Cheers
Christian, iwspo.netCyncCyncthect on May 15th, 2010 at 6:42 pm
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