Is Translation Accessibility?
Making your site more accessible will help you get your content through to some fraction of all the folks who have trouble cutting through the UI to the content.
Translating your site into Chinese will help you get your content through to some fraction of one billion people.
This is purely rhetorical; we try as hard as we can to use Javascript and CSS unobtrusively, and all that. Heck, it might even be breaking the law to make a website unaccessible in this sense.
But doesn’t translating also make a site more accessible?
3 comments.
Technorati tags: Language and the Web, translation
Only if China does not block your site.
Good point, Wo. I picked the example of Chinese simply because it (according to several definitions of “it”) has the most speakers of any language.
I think my point still holds if you take the example of a language which is where the speakers are more spread out over the globe: consider Portuguese, for example. Translating content into Portuguese gets you a couple hundred million of speakers on several continents. Any one particular government couldn’t shut down that reading population.
Anyway, yeah, a more general definition of what “accessible” content is should factor in censorship as well.
Take a look at:
http://fm.multilingual.com/FMPro?-db=archives&-format=ourpublication%2ffeaturedarticlesdetail.htm&-lay=cgi&-sortfield=Magazine%20Number&-sortorder=descend&-op=cn&Author=ultan&intro=yes&-recid=33575&-find=