What is it about?
This article discusses how website security questions, such as "what is the first name of the best man at your wedding," stem from a heteronormative, North-American, middle-class outlook of culture. It proposes applying the concept of "cultural ergonomics" to address the biased language before translation and localization to ensure inclusivity in both the domestic language product and localized product since multicultural users exist within and outside national borders.
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Why is it important?
System-generated language in the form of security questions have long been taken for granted as they have no authorship and present no immediate market value. As such they are understudied and undervalued by the translation and localization industry. By drawing attention to the issue of monocultural and monoethnic language bias in the security questions, this article makes the case that "translation" is not just a conversion between language scripts and needed for "foreign" users. It also calls attention to the lapse in the localization industry when it claims to do "more than translation," but fails to address the cultural bias in the source text and replicates it in the localized product.
Perspectives
While conducting research for this article, I have come across many people from different cultures who are equally frustrated by these security questions. We, the consumers, grudgingly accept what these websites ask us to do because there is no alternative if we would like to continue using the sites. I hope the article sheds light on this bias so that multicultural users feel seen and heard. And I hope industry will recognize that training in the latest AI technology or technical platform for translation and localization is not enough to ensure the level of cultural literacy needed to create more inclusive language products.
Nancy Tsai
National Taiwan University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Cultural ergonomics in localization, Digital Translation, July 2024, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/dt.00011.tsa.
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