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Conference presentation
English

Making digital content accessible: a collaborative task between the web developer and the localiser

Contributors

Rodriguez Vazquez, Silvia; Torres del Rey, Jesús

Presented at

The coming of age of Translation Technologies in Translation Studies. First International T3L Conference: Tradumatica, Translation Technologies & Localization, Barcelona (Spain), 21st-22nd June 2011

Publication date

2011

Abstract

The localisation process has generally been seen as a practice implemented after the web development cycle, but not as a simultaneous and complementary task. In this regard, the "accessibilisation", as well as the internationalization process, is usually predefined and carried out by non translation/non localisation experts during the preliminary phases of web design. Complementing Localisation Studies with existing translation theories and web accessibility know-how would provide professional localisers with greater communication and technical skills, which would help them to achieve a comparable degree of accessibility in the target product to that achieved in the original one. This would make information available and accessible for all the multilingual community, regardless of, or in accordance with, their functional diversity. In order to assess the importance of accessibility skills not just for the designer but also for the localiser, who takes on a crucial role in the web production cycle, an experiment was designed on two original web pages –one accessible, one non-accessible, with the help of three localisers. For this empirical test, only one of the three subjects had accessibility knowledge. During the comparative study, a set of quality control rules were developed and implemented according to existing web accessibility guidelines and techniques, with the aim of partially automating the accessibility analysis and making this task easier for the localiser. The results showed that it is not enough to have an accessible source product: the quality of the final product, from a macro- and microtextual level, as well as from a technical and creative perspective, is higher when the localiser knows how to deal with the accessibility transfer process and with possible breakdown in that process, caused by asymmetries in terms of cultural, linguistic or technical parameters, and also when they can complement this ability with some expert internationalisation knowledge.

Keywords

  • Localisation
  • Web accessibility
  • Internationalisation
  • QA
  • Web development cycle

UNIGE affiliation entities

UNIGE research groups

Citation (ISO format)

RODRIGUEZ VAZQUEZ, Silvia, TORRES DEL REY, Jesús. Making digital content accessible: a collaborative task between the web developer and the localiser. In: The coming of age of Translation Technologies in Translation Studies. First International T3L Conference: Tradumatica, Translation Technologies & Localization. Barcelona (Spain). 2011.

Identifiers

  • PID : unige:39845

Additional URL for this publication

http://tradumatica.uab.cat/conference/en/introduction.htm
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Technical informations

Creation

26/08/2014 13:48:00

First validation

26/08/2014 13:48:00

Update

13/10/2025 22:26:21

Status update

14/03/2023 21:33:50

Last indexation

14/11/2025 13:23:52
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