This year I created the LocData Project. It is an online, crowdsourced map that collects data on localization points of interest around the world, like translators associations, LSPs, technology, academic programs, and certifications.
Making the Map
I’d never tried crowdsourcing or geographic mapping before, so this project took a lot of independent research and trial and error. I eventually settled on using the platform ArcGIS, and I created a crowdsourcing form in Survey123. Users can fill out a form, including a built-in map to search addresses and place names. The questions are responsive depending of how the survey is filled. Users with ArcGIS accounts (available to all students at the Middlebury Institute) can also access the information inside the map, export its data, and review Survey123’s built-in analytics.
Designing a survey that would work for collecting this type of data was difficult, because most things in life really don’t fit into tiny boxes. I tried to think about how users would actually end up using the map and designed questions that could allow people to filter according to what I imagine they might need.
Another challenge was getting data to import externally. It’s actually quite simple to import data from a CSV into the map, but the data has to be spotless and follow the exact same formatting as the survey, which most data you pull from online doesn’t. Down the road, if future people working on this project come across comprehensive data sets, it’ll be worth automating.
Stop Hiding Key Information
A big realization I had during the collection process is that companies and schools are not very good at marketing themselves. Or if they are, they purposely obscure the kind of data I was looking for. For example, on many degree program pages, it was difficult to locate what languages they offer translation courses in. I actually ended up applying this lesson quickly in my own life. I also worked for the Middlebury Marketing and Communications department this year, and was asked to look over pages for the Institute’s new joint TI/TLM degree: I immediately rapid fired back a response that the page needed to list language pairs and entrance requirements.
Hiring Newcomers
At the end of the semester, I also oversaw the hiring for three new students. I wrote a job listing and came up with criteria and interview questions for evaluating respondents. I also attended interviews and created handoff materials. I’m excited to see where the project goes next. I made a framework for collection, but it’s still far too early to pull the data to make too many sweeping generalizations about the industry. Now that the project has expanded from me to three people, I’m looking forward to seeing the data grow.
Last summer, I pumped out a card game in about 80 hours of work. Since then, things have spiraled. In addition to hosting marketing events like a Twitch stream and joining a Nimdzi Live session, I also managed translation of the product into traditional Chinese and Mexican Spanish, did DTP QA after the assets were localized, and took steps towards creating a digital version of the game, including creating a specifications form with concept art, generating a price estimate, designing sponsorship marketing materials, and reaching out to LSPs about fundraising.
Growing this game was especially interesting, because I was there for every aspect of the project. Everything from the paragraph styles in the Indesign booklet to the placement of the freckles on the Pear character were created by me. Most work experiences aren’t like that. You usually collaborate with a large team. If you’re on the vendor side of localization, you might not have a connection to the creator at all. Because this product was my baby, I new it inside and out and could provide newcomers with anything they needed.
My biggest takeaway from a year working on Fruit Vendor is this: Making something is easy. Maintaining it is hard. Growing it is even harder.
Do It Right the First Time
Here’s an example of how one small change spiraled. In the game design process, Alaina asked for the Bad Apple cards to allow users to steal all the judge’s cards. I felt like this was a little too powerful, so in an early draft, I changed it so that you can only steal one. Alaina disagreed, so I changed it back. Fast forward to the spring semester when MIIS students played and tested the cards, many people gave feedback that the Bad Apple cards were indeed too powerful. Alaina and I circled back and decided to change the rules so that the Bad Apple cards only let you steal one card. Implementing this change meant going into the assets again, editing the cards, editing the instructions pamphlet, editing the images inside the instructions pamphlet, changing the instructions on the website, and changing the images on the website, and changing the images in the Game Crafter listing. That’s a lot. And that hassle might have been prevented if, back in that early design stage, I’d pushed back more and done more testing.
Priorities Are Weird
There’s a funny online joke of a passage in a book writing the line, “The curtains were blue.” A literature professor asked their students to analyze the deep metaphorical significance of the color choice of the curtains. When the author was asked why the curtains were blue, they replied, “I don’t know, man, I just like blue.” I felt like that author a lot in this project.
While the translators were overly concerned with meaning, I prioritized tone. The game’s translators, Ruby Lee for zh-TW and Grizelda Ambriz for es-MX played it too safe at first in the translation process. The titles of the English cards, for example, are catchy alliterations like “Speedy Strawberry,” “Bookish Banana,” and “Justice Jackfruit.” Stuff like this is hard to localize. When they asked me what to do, I told them to go ham. I genuinely couldn’t not have cared less about preserving the meaning. The titles didn’t change the function of the cards at all, they just needed to be cute and catchy.
A similar sentiment was echoed in the design of the cards. Grizelda once told me they felt “represented” by the cards because I’d chosen to include tamarind. Tamarind an unusual fruit for the US, I guess, but it’s common in Mexico and was one of Grizelda’s favorite childhood foods. I smiled and nodded and didn’t tell Grizelda the reason I put tamarind in the deck was because it’s an easy fruit shape to make in Photoshop and I am lazy.
Conversely, I was extremely concerned with brand consistency in ways my two colleagues weren’t. Ruby is a talented artist, and was eager to add her own illustrations to the branding. She’s a much better artist than me, but the style was not consistent with the assets I’d created which made them unusable. Likewise, I found myself sounding like a broken record at times in my insistence of adhering to the style guide. Is anyone really going to tell if the blue used in a poster is a slightly different blue than the one used in the project cards? No. But I will.
Fiver and Upwork Leave Something to be Desired
I originally planned on outsourcing development of the digital version of the game. I made a 16-page specifications form, complete with 13 concept art files that outlined exactly what the project needed. I wrote a precise but succinct posting on Fiver and Upwork and reached out to people who I thought might be a good fit. The developers who replied or reached out to me on their own left something to be desired. The messages were rude, had typos, and didn’t acknowledge the project’s specifications at all. It took a while to draw out a semblance of a price estimate from these users, and I don’t feel like any of them were a very good candidate.
Instead, I think Fruit Vendor should pivot to an in-house model. There are a few localization students at the Middlebury Institute with strong tech skills who could be a good fit. Instead of continuing to spiral down the rabbit hole of finding someone to make a complicated web version, maybe we should just make a discord bot. Doing so would be simpler, but it could also be better because we could easily host games on the Institute server. We could even make the bot open source on github and let other companies adapt it for their own work training.
Fundraising Takes More Time Than You Think
I don’t know why, but for some reason I assumed fundraising was more of an, “if you build it they will come,” scenario. It takes a lot more effort. I created a fundraising proposal with a project overview, proof of concept, explanation of the games applications and target audience, benefits of sponsorship, a project timeline, essential costs, gifts and benefits for different levels of donors, instructions for how to pledge, an overview of the long-term maintenance of the game, and conclusions and annexes. I then talked with some companies in the localization industry.
My biggest observation is that no one likes being first to sponsor something, but they do like bandwagoning. Companies were hesitant to pledge especially at the beginning because there is always a risk that projects may fall through or not go well. Momentum did eventually pick up, and I’m hopeful that the new students I’m handing the Fruit Vendor project off to will have the funding they need by next year to finance the digital version.
What’s Next
Next year I will be saying goodbye to Fruit Vendor and handing the game off to other students. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’m a little nervous (what if they don’t follow the style guide). The bumps we encountered this semester, however, provided lessons that next year’s team members don’t have to learn the hard way. There are tentative plans in the works for a Simplified Chinese and Japanese translation of the decks!
I recently worked with a few friends, Tuojin Yin, Albert Phan, Yen Ting Low, and Wei Yuan to make a simple game called Tingting’s Dictionary. We used RPG Maker MV to create an interactive story in which users meets an alien named Tingting, learns to communicate, and then apply their newfound language skills to build a machine that can save the world. I played two main roles in the development of the game: management and alien language development.
Management
My main takeaway from creating the game concept is that stories flow better with fewer cooks in the kitchen. Our first team meeting was an overflow of enthusiastic ideas, but actually converting ideas into a logical story just wasn’t working. I pulled out a piece of paper and started drawing a story board, and when this turned out to be helpful, we migrated to an electronic story board.
I oversaw documentation and organization of the project on our team platform, Confluence. My first step was to create a meeting minutes page and Phase pages of the game design. I also provided a tutorial video showing teammates how to navigate the pages. During meetings, I led by assigning tasks and documenting who was assigned to complete what by which dates. During meetings I also served as a scribe on our Phase pages, writing detailed outlines of exactly what each step of the game should look like. Since we were working in such a limited time frame, having an organized platform where every task and all game logic was documented was extremely helpful.
Our game was originally much more ambitious than what we planned for, but we decided to take an agile approach by first constructing a skeleton and then adding bells and whistles after. I would strongly recommend this type of game creation model to others. We didn’t have time to create all the branching alternate engines teammates had envisioned, but since we had focused on completing a core version first, we could still have finished product on-time.
Audio
It was important for Tingting’s Dictionary to have an audio component. Reinforcing the newly learned alien words with audio feedback could help players internalize the language, and it also made the came cuter and more entertaining.
Samples of Tingting’s Language
I recorded the audio sounds in Adobe Audition and cleaned the sound so that there was no background noise. I then added them to the game’s Sound Effects folder and set up commands so that Tingting would speak the equivalent of the words written onscreen.
To decide what Tingting should sound like, I did some research into constructed languages (or conlangs) by watching video breakdowns online. I wanted Tingting to sound cute, but a little strange. A takeaway I have from trying to invent Tingting’s dialogue is that what sounds alien to me may not sound so strange to a different locale. Some of the sounds Tingting makes sound more compatible with Japanese, Chinese, or maybe even Hindi. For a larger project, I think it would be best to workshop your conlang to see if it properly conveys strangeness for that locale.
Written Language
Most aliens in popular media are meant to be intimidating, but for this project, we wanted something that looked odd, but endearing. I looked to two examples of alien written languages for inspiration: Boovish, written by the Boovs of the children’s book the True Meaning of Smekday, and Gallifreyan, written by the Doctor in Doctor Who. Both of these alien languages use bubble-based writing systems. I decided to look for a writing system that also had bubbles.
I eventually found Nyctographic, provided by Pixel Sagas. Nyctography is an old cipher originally invented by Lewis Carol for jotting down quick notes in the dark. The characters originally would have been written by following the edges of a square holes in a gridded card. It worked well as an easy, cheap way to add a sense of strangeness to the game, without having to make a character system from scratch using something like Calligraphr and FontForge.
Getting Nyctographic into the game was harder than I anticipated. Most work in RPG Maker can be done right inside the interface without messing too much with code. While it’s easy to pop into the code and change the game font for the entire interface, making only certain lines switch was not as simple. We ended up using a Load Custom Fonts plugin developed by Yanfly to replace the font for Tingting’s lines.
Conclusions
Overall, I was not impressed with RPG Maker MV’s localization capabilities. It’s a very easy platform to make a game in, but it doesn’t have good built-in solutions for adding more locales, and the localization plugin we turned to was not compatible with some of our other plugins. Nonetheless, it was a worthwhile learning experience to see just how much work goes into even a simple game, especially navigating one that has an alien language in addition to the target language and incorporating custom audio, fonts, and graphics.
I’ve recently been getting into theatrics again, and decided to make a short comedy cartoon, called Earthly Attachments. I made two versions of the video: one in English and one in Chinese. I recorded the cartoons in Adobe Character Animator and did post editing in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Earthly Attachments
What is Adobe Character Animator?
Adobe Character Animator is a super convenient tool for live control of cartoon puppets. You make a puppet in Photoshop or Illustrator, upload it to Adobe Character Animator, and hit record! The tool syncs your speech to lip movements and uses your computer camera to track eye movement, eyebrow movement, blinking, and body swaying to control the puppet’s motion. Adobe Character Animator rolled out full body tracking in the October 2021 release too.
My interest in Adobe Character Animator was first piqued when I was looking for an automated way to make assets for the card game I made called Fruit Vendor. I decided to follow along to this tutorial for making a basic head to make the fruit characters for the game. Adobe provides free templates, so starting projects doesn’t require high technical or artistic skills.
The Workflow
Writing the Script
The hardest (and most important) part of this project was the script. Since this was my first time making a cartoon, I wanted to keep it short and simple, with minimal motion. No animation or moving objects, just two talking heads. When I was brainstorming, I looked at animation samples on YouTube, and was struck by a sad feeling: so many of the videos were BORING. They had beautiful graphics, perfect audio timing, and intricate puppet rigging that must have taken days, but no matter how good the packaging is, if the script is lacking, all of that work is a waste. I workshopped script ideas with my sister (an opera singer who does theatrics for a living) and then translated it with the help of my friend Yin Tuojin, whose name you see credited in the Chinese version.
After the animation draft was done, Alaina Brandt pointed out that the script is actually extremely similar to a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon panel. My sister and I grew up pouring over our dad’s 2 volume anthology of all the Calvin and Hobbes comics, so that checks out. It worked out nicely that the voice of reason in the Earthy Attachments animation is a cat, just like Hobbes.
Gathering Animation Assets
For Earthly Attachments, I didn’t want to spend a ton of time making new custom assets. I just wanted to experiment and get an idea of the workflow from start to finish, so instead I used 3 different resources to make the characters for the cartoon. The backdrop is from a free backdrop template pack provided by Adobe. The main character was made in Adobe Character Animator’s Puppet Maker, which is a neat new feature rolled out in December 2021 that lets you make custom puppets in different styles without even needing to open Photoshop or Illustrator. For internationalized projects, I would actually recommend using racially ambiguous characters, like robots or monsters, but for this project, I made a mini version of myself. The second character, Tull the Cat, is an Adobe stock character created by Dave Werner (aka Okay Samurai). I love this puppet because it’s got a ton of built in expressions and triggers. Even though the cat only has one line in the Earthly Attachments cartoon, I needed him to express a range of facial expressions including happiness, concern, skepticism, annoyance, sarcasm, and surprise.
Record
I started with the Chinese version. In Adobe Character Animator, you have the option to pick and choose what elements of the puppet you want to record each time. I decided to record the face and audio at once but add triggers and hand motions afterward.
Once I finished the Chinese version of the core animation track, I started again with the English version. At first, I intended to just dub over, and keep everything the same in the animation except for the lip movements. However, I realized when I did so, the English version was painfully slow, and the body motions didn’t sync up as perfectly as I would like. Part of what makes Adobe Character Animator so great is that it’s really easy to record everything from scratch again, so that’s what I did. This wouldn’t be practical for a longer project, but for this short clip, it made the English version a lot smoother.
Post Editing
Next I brought the cartoons into Adobe Premiere Pro and added a title, credits, and music. I think it’s fun to note how much more forgiving people are of childishness in cartoons. The fonts in both English and Chinese are very juvenile, and the music is actually from the children’s section of the YouTube sound library (remixed and ducked in Premiere Pro). I jokingly did a live demo of the voice acting in front of Tuojin, and she responded, “The lines sound totally normal said by the cartoon, but soo strange said by the real you.”
Takeaways
In a previous dubbing project I did, I had a problem where the cartoon character was doing finger quotes while saying a specific word. In the Chinese dub, it was grammatically impossible to time it correctly so that the Chinese dubbed word synched with the English animation. There is merit in completely re-recording the motion, or at the very least re-recording key motion triggers.
Adobe Character Animator is really easy to use, especially if you stick to the puppet maker tool, stock puppets, or simple floating heads. Even with little knowledge of the application, I was able to crank out an animation in a less than a day of work. I think the convenience of the program is largely thanks to Dave Werner for making so many free assets and easy-to-follow YouTube tutorials.
Make Your Own Project!
Here are 5 routes to start making animations as a beginner:
Download Orangey, a simple fruit puppet I made for Fruit Vendor. Open it up in Photoshop to get an idea of the structure. Upload Orangey to Adobe Character Animator and try rigging the leaves so that they sway when you move your head.
Build puppets in the Adobe Character Animator Puppet Maker: Just rev up the software and select the puppet maker option. Puppet Maker also has built-in backdrops.
You can also use the puppets on the home page of Adobe Character Animator.
Re-model an existing puppet: Take a puppet like Adobe Character Animator’s “Blank” or “Chloe” puppet, open it in Photoshop or Illustrator, and and adjust it to look the way you want. Follow this tutorial by Dave Werner.
I made a brief voice over demo for cartoons and dubbing. Enjoy!
The audio track was organized and lightly edited in Adobe Audition, and the video was made in Adobe Premiere Pro.
My biggest takeaway from this demo exercise is that it’s best to lean into your own abilities rather than try to be something you’re not. My first shot at the Tree Spirit voice was deep and growly, but after listening back, I realized it didn’t work. I naturally have a younger voice, so it sounded like a child pretending to be an adult. I reevaluated and decided that the character didn’t need to sound powerful to be scary. Kyubey from Madoka Magica, voiced by Cassandra Lee Morris in the English dub, is bone-chilling precisely because the character sounds innocent.
Characters
To make this demo recording, I designed the following short character concepts and then wrote scripts accordingly.
Chad: Tween bully on the football team. Most definitely does NOT have a crush on that nerd his friends pick on.
Wheezer: Old man caught with ?contraband? in his trunk.
Doc Marz: Scientist on a mission to a far away galaxy. Uh oh, the team’s spaceship is attacked by aliens!
Princess Inaya: Proud, angsty princess captured by an enemy ship.
Fannie Pharma: Everything she owns is probably from Target.
Fun Fact Felix: Curious little boy.
Tricilla: Younger sister of the empress. Aspires to become an only child so that she can RULE THE WORLD!
Tree Spirit: not immoral, just amoral.
Buffy Dumpsty: Loves girly things like sleepovers, nail polish, and kicking people in the shins.
Me and a team of students worked on a small project to localize an English language game into Chinese and Japanese.
The game is called Top-Down Racing Car and is created in C#. It’s a simple game in which users control a car with their keyboard right and left keys to avoid hitting other cars. Depending how long they avoid obstacles, they are awarded bronze, silver, or gold medal.
Our team divided our work into two groups: visual design and engineering. I focused on visual design, performing desktop publishing work on text embedded in images.
Ideally games shouldn’t have any text embedded in images to begin with as it makes localization (or game modifications in general) much more difficult. Unfortunately, though, a lot of games still use this, especially for fancy texts custom fonts.
I completed two versions of DTP to demonstrate different versions of localization. In the first round, into Simplified Chinese, I tried to imitate the source as closely as possible. I pulled the images into Photoshop, masked over the original text with black rectangles that matched the background, and added new text in Chinese in a similar-ish font to the original. To match the text effects of the original, I followed two approaches. For bronze and silver, I added a border and gradients and used the eyedropper tool to imitate the exact gradient colors of the original. For gold, I used two different offset copies of the text in gold and white.
I did need to make some tweaks to the original design to accommodate Chinese. Chinese characters like “赢” (win) are really detailed. To make sure the text was readable, I increased character size and decreased the border size around the text. To maintain the rhythm of the original, the grammar was changed from “You win / Bronze” to “You have been awarded / Bronze”
The best part about these effect settings is that they still allow the text to be entirely editable. I could add ten more languages easily and would only need to make minimal changes to accommodate text expansion or character detail.
Good localization, though, isn’t always about imitating the source as closely as possible. Different locales need different things! Our team decided to take a more creative approach to Japanese localization and created new graphics. Our visual design head, Ruby, decided on a color scheme and designed custom cars and medals, and I followed these design guidelines to create new “you win” notifications. I added colorful gradient backgrounds and used custom fonts from Google.
An issue we were fortunate not to have in this game is driving direction. The US and China drive on the right side of the road, but Japan drives on the left. Luckily enough, this game was designed from the beginning with all the cars moving in the same direction, so it can work in either locale. Something the original creators didn’t do well, though, is that they embedded the word “ambulance” into a car. Instead of translating this for every language, I just scrubbed the text entirely.
When these visual assets were done, they were added to the game by our engineering team, who also implemented a globe button that creates a language pop-up menu. In the menu, users can change their language settings quickly and easily.
My takeaway from this project is that it’s a lot easier to internationalize from the very beginning. It would have been a real headache to change the car direction. I spent a lot of time re-creating assets in Photoshop that could have been saved if the text wasn’t embedded or at the very least if I had the original Photoshop files. I also enjoyed practicing creative localization by making fun visuals for the Japanese interface.
Self-publishing a card game may seem daunting, but have no fear! In this post, I’ll show you how I took my card game Fruit Vendor from concept to game night.
Step 1) Planning
Fruit Vendor first came about when Alaina Brandt envisioned using a game to spark conversations about the localization vendor selection process. Through pre-design conversations, we boiled down the most necessary information needed on each of the cards. Cards are teeny tiny, so try to keep the design simple.
Step 2) Chose Your Platform
There are many ways to self publish your game. The site I used to publish Fruit Vendor is called Game Crafter. Whichever platform you chose, check their site for templates. All your assets, like card fronts, card backs, box, and instructions, will need to meet strict measurements to ensure they print correctly. You don’t want to make all your cards only to learn at the very end of your project that your assets are too small!
Step 3) Draft and Test
Rather than start making all your cards right away, make one or two of each type of cards in the deck. Evaluate how this drafting process went. Are your cards easily scalable? Did you hit any snags? My first draft of Fruit Vendor had images of humans for the vendor characters in the game. I realized through drafting that assigning the characters genders, skin colors, ages, and clothing could encourage bias in the hiring process, so I decided to scratch the humans and make the characters fruit instead! This ended up being a great decision as it inspired fun branding for the game. It was at this point that I settled on the name Fruit Vendor for the game.
Step 4) Plan for Your Future Self
My biggest regret for this project is that I made the assets in Photoshop. Vector graphics would have been easier to blow up for posters.
My best decision for this project was adopting puppet templates by Dave Werner to make fruit characters. By using these templates, I saved loads of time, and all of the characters can be automatically animated in Adobe Character Animator for video advertising!
These days, more and more people in localization are starting to pay attention to accessibility, and for good reason. Dubbing often intermingles with visual description. Subtitling collaborates with captioning. Web developers learning how to format text strings for localization are also learning how to add alt-text. Olivia Plowman and I decided it to do a small project learning more about translation from a localizer’s perspective.
Brief overview of our project
Types of Assistive Technology
There are tons of clever tools people use to navigate the web. Envato Tuts+ has a quick video overview with some examples. A barebones list includes:
Screen magnifiers: These make the text and/or other elements of the page larger
Color changers: These tools can change the color of the page, such as turning black text on a white background to white text on a black background. They might also change the appearance of links. My blog has a magnifier and color changer plugin by WP Accessibility.
Alternate input devices: Instead of typing or using a mouse, some people use technology that tracks body motion or eye movement
Screen readers: Screen readers convert the contents of pages into a new format such as sound narration or a braille display. My limited circle of colleagues who are blind prefer Apple’s built-in screen reader called Voiceover
Creating Accessible Content
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is the place to start if you want to learn how to design your content. They published a public working draft of their 3.0 Accessibility Guidelines this January. If English isn’t your first language, have no fear! They translate tons of their content.
WAI also created a fantastic, annotated demo website to show the importance of accessible design. The two sites look identical, but one version is a breeze for people with disabilities to navigate, and the other is a nightmare. The page is a little old (2012) based on 2.0 guidelines, but is still relevant to today. Hopefully a 3.0 guideline version of the demo comes out soon.
Content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress and Drupal have built-in features to make your site more accessible. For WordPress, pick a theme with an “accessibility-ready” tag. You can also add a plugin like WP accessibility. For Drupal, look for the #D8AX pledge, which stands for Drupal 8 Accessibility eXperience. The MacArthur Foundation has complied resources about WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Squarespace, and Wix. They also have info on forms and surveys, as well as accessibility cheatsheets for web content, Microsoft Office, and Adobe.
Instructions for identifying Web Accessibility Issues by The National Center on Disability and Access to Education (NCDAE)
The WAI has a running list of all the possible Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools on the market (free and paid) globally. The list has checkers for specific locales and languages.
Translating Your Site
When localizing a game a few months ago, Olivia and I had trouble making sure our Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tool had all the relevant text it needed from the source code. We wondered how well CAT tools do picking up non-visible text that screen readers use, so we ran a few test pages through SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, and Memsource.
We used this checklist to evaluate the pages:
Alternative Text for Images: This text is used to describe images embedded in the webpage.
Title Attributes: Similarly, this text is for describing the site titles that may be created as images.
Certain CSS Text for Screen Readers: This text does not appear to the end-user and is only used by screen readers to help further audibly describe the webpage.
Table Summaries: Screen readers can read tables quite literally, which results in a confusing jumble for the user. A table summary can help the user understand what the table shows.
Long Descriptions: Known as longdesc in HTML, this provides longer descriptions to the screen reader and can be found in the website’s HTML.
ARIA-Label Attributes: These label elements of the HTML that have specific purposes, like buttons.
Language Attribute: A label for the page’s language.
This project set a lot of cogs turning for me. I spent a while on Adobe InDesign tutorials and my own computer’s screen reader trying to figure out how to make the tables in our grading PDF work. This webpage pops up a couple of errors on WAVE. Accessible design is hard. Accessible design is time consuming. Done right, though, it has some surprising benefits related to translation.
Automated translation is a lot easier when your web-pages are accessible. I’ve had to do research in Indonesian and Bosnian before. Do I know those languages? Nope! I just used Google Translate’s browser extension to get the “gist” of the pages. In my everyday life, I frequently deploy cursor dictionaries to look up new Chinese words. When text is embedded in images, these tools can’t work.
I look forward to seeing more LSPs and clients pay mind to accessibility. Even companies dragging their feet will need to start paying attention. Level Access predicts that there’ll be over 4,000 web accessibility lawsuits this year. In our increasingly global world, understanding accessibility legal requirements isn’t just “nice to have;” it’s a must.
Most importantly though, my screen-reader using friends don’t deserve to get caught in a death spiral of garbled nonsense image labels.
Translation Management Systems are a huge investment for Language Service Providers. What can you do to ensure you chose the right system for your company? How can you justify your choice to senior management?
Xiaoxin Damerow and I worked together to simulate the enterprise software selection process for a hypothetical language service provider that specializes in audiovisual localization. We created a scorecard that breaks down key business requirements based on stakeholders, identifies “Must Have” versus “Nice to Have” features, and weighs total evaluation scores accordingly.
You’re welcome to download our .XLSX scorecard and tweak it for your own project.
It’s hard to keep up to date with recent Chinese legal texts. My team and I decided to try our hands at customizing a neural machine translation engine (think Google Translate) that specializes in cybersecurity law using a free trial version of Microsoft Custom Translator. We fed the engine segments of aligned Chinese and English text segments and Microsoft Custom Translator did the heavy lifting of identifying patterns.
