Cultural Ergonomics in Localization
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.
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.