 Localization Program Manager with the localization lab. She coordinates all the localization that the lab supports. She coordinates all the localization that the localization lab supports with projects, building localization resources and then bridging the divide between developers and users and then regional organization programs. She's going to talk to us about localizing applications and breaking down language barriers. So please, Erin, come to your room. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Good arts story introduction. So yeah, my name is Erin McConnell and I'm the localization program coordinator with localization lab. Welcome to breaking down language barriers, localizing for access, activism, and preservation. So localization lab is a nonprofit organization that focuses on localizing technologies and resources. Specifically, I would describe it as a community. We're about 6,000 volunteer contributors along with developers, human rights organizations, and society groups that collaborate together to localize internet freedom tools and educational resources that support them. Internet freedom tools is kind of a broad umbrella. What it incorporates for us is digital security tools as well as circumvention tools. So secure messaging, VPNs, task tools, and then educational resources to help use those localizations about those different projects. In addition, the vast majority of the content that we work on is open source. I'm safe with very few exceptions because we also value open source principles like open exchange. And over the past five years, we've worked on over 70 different open source digital security circumvention projects, localizing them into over 100 different languages and dialects. So why care so much about localization? Why is it so important? Why is it important for us as an organization? Why should it be important for you? We'll just look at some of the basic numbers on the content side. So of about 7.5 billion people on the planet, it's only just over 3.5 billion that currently have access to the internet. And of those 3.5 billion, only about 25% are native or non-native speakers of English. And then the rest of the about 4 billion people that currently don't have access to the internet, it's about 80% of them who don't speak English. So it's a significant portion of the population that doesn't necessarily have access to content or technologies that are available in English. So despite the fact about over 50% of the content on the internet is currently in English. And then just to add to all of that, it's estimated, or some research has shown that about 85% of people won't use a service or a technology if it's not available in their native language. So whether or not they speak English, they might not choose to use the service because they don't necessarily feel confident with using technologies or accessing content in that language. So what does this mean and how does this translate to real individual experiences? While our executive director, was on a panel about two years ago called What Languages Are... Who is... What languages are available on the internet? Who decides what languages are available on the internet? One of the panelists in that discussion was a sapotec activist and localizer named Rodrigo Perez. And Rodrigo first gained access to a computer that was connected to the internet about 10 years ago. However, he opened up NetSign to explore and saw that everything was in English. Content was in English. The application was in English. And he decided immediately that the internet is not familiar. And it was another five years before he actually came back to try and access the internet and realized that several applications had been localized into Spanish, that there was more content available in Spanish online. And he was actually able to benefit from using the internet and start contributing to the digital space. Unfortunately for other people in his community, however, who did not have the luxury benefit of speaking Spanish as a second language, they were sapotec speakers, they still had that linguistic barrier keeping them from accessing the digital space. And so Rodrigo started focusing a lot of his efforts on localizing open source technologies into sapotec so that the rest of his community would be able to access the internet. And so I'm going to be throwing a lot of quotes because these are from actual contributors that work on projects of ours. They're very meaningful, which you may all say are meaningful for you. This is from Chiro Musotsa who is a localizer that works on making content available in Shona, which is a language that's spoken in Zimbabwe. For a recent article that she wrote for Localization Lab, she said, if technology on the internet are going to make any inroads into developing nations, it's important to understand that technology will only be adopted when the local culture and language are reflected in the interface of the tools you're expected to use. So in addition to just simple access to content, in addition to linguistic access being a barrier to access to content on the internet, there are also physical world implications to not having access to that information and human rights implications. And this kind of goes on, as Tanela was mentioning, if a tool like the Tour Browser is not available in the language that you speak, then you don't have the ability to benefit from using that circumvention technology to get around censorship or to secure your communications, to secure your browser activity. In addition, if you, let's say, you're a human rights defender or a journalist working on high-risk contacts, if you don't have information available about how you can secure your communications between contacts or secure your data so that it can't be accessed by adversaries, then this can lead to physical consequences. So in addition to localization being important to internet access and keeping people safe with the digital sphere and the physical sphere, localization is also a key aspect of language preservation and activism. Now that so much content that we access so much information and content through the digital sphere through technologies, a big part of keeping languages alive and rejuvenating them is making technology and content on the internet available in those languages. So we've recently worked with an Aymada community, an Aymada-speaking community. Aymada is an indigenous language spoken in Bolivia. And despite the fact that about 17% of Bolvians speak Aymada, it's still considered a minority language. And use of Aymada in the 70s and 80s was actually banned in education sphere and official spaces. So people are really struggling to preserve the language, to ensure that young people start speaking it, and as a way to preserve culture, history, and heritage. This is a quote from Edwin Kiste, who's the executive director of Hakealu, which is an organization in Bolivia that's trying to bring Aymada into the digital space. He said, we ask ourselves, who are we? We lose our identity. For us, languages are our identity. If we lose our language, we lose our traditions, our culture, our stories, our ancestral knowledge, we lose everything. So for Hakealu and for a lot of other organizations throughout Latin America, speakers of indigenous languages, as well as here in mainland Europe, speakers of languages like Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Latin languages that have traditionally been marginalized, and speakers have been oppressed. Creating localizing technology is a way to preserve the language and it's also in itself kind of an active resistance against, and one contributor to Breton Technologies, when we asked him why he was so specific on technology, he emphasized that it's really important to replace technology as a way to specifically target youth and get youth to speak the Breton language. So in addition to working on security technologies, he also localizes video games and educational materials. And then lastly, at Locosation Lab, we really will be applying diversity of perspectives, opinions and backgrounds, results in more creativity and more ingenuity. So in addition to just making sure that people have access to information online, and it's really important for us that we also help to promote content creation in other languages from people from different backgrounds and also development in different languages. This is just a quote from this one. So at this point, I was originally just going to talk about some best practices for localizations and processes that you can put in place to ensure that you're engaging communities in a localization process that you end up with effective localization and high-quality transitions. But I decided to kind of change course and talk a little bit more about some of the more complex issues, cultural and linguistic issues that affect localization that you can't necessarily plan for. So we just had the tour project presentation. How many people are familiar with plentiful transports? Who knows how to translate plentiful transports into another language? Or how would you even approach translating plentiful transports into another language? So it's already a really complicated technical concept to understand. So translating into another language is an incredibly difficult task. So this is something that we struggle with with the tour project and several other projects. You have these concepts that you can't even necessarily effectively describe in English in order to translate them into other languages. So ultimately, it's necessary to have a lot of conversation around these terms and discuss approaches for how to best articulate these concepts depending on language and also different cultural contexts. So for some languages groups of translators have decided to just use the English term because they decided that it's better than any other option available in another language. So better just have it in English and then describe what the term means or the concept of how plentiful transports work using the language itself. Other languages have tried to do literal translations and for instance, this is not the option then. Other languages have decided to try and translate the meaning of what public transports actually do. So of course, public transports is a complicated term to translate understandably. But what about a term or a concept like privacy? So you might think that the term privacy, that the concept of privacy is pretty much universal, but in fact it isn't necessarily. Sometimes translation of something as simple as privacy is very complicated. For me, for example, there actually isn't a term for privacy and there also isn't a concept of privacy condition. This is a very new concept for a lot of people. How do you explain something like privacy when there are parts of Burma in which doors are not locked and sometimes there are no doors. This is direct feedback that we've gotten from localizers working on projects in Burmese. When email and social media passwords are shared with friends and family, when phone passwords are shared with phone shop attendants, like when you want to add new applications to your phone and you take them to the phone assistant, give them the passcode and they would have access to all of your data. So all of these analogies that you might use to explain the concept of privacy to people, like the concept of privacy in the digital space to people using physical examples, blocking the door or having maybe a safe box or something. Sometimes those don't work and to come to expand this this is not just limited to languages like Burmese, this has also been a complication trying to translate digital security content into MI where privacy almost directly translates to secret or secrecy which means that often privacy and secrecy are conflated. So how do you talk about general privacy in terms of general digital hygiene as opposed to things that you have to keep privacy as a right and digital hygiene concept as opposed to information that you're trying to hide from others because it might be bad. So among other language challenges that we face on a regular basis in addition to complex technical terms and concepts, I'm dealing with the numerable neologisms that pop up constantly. The use of metaphors and analogies in tools and in documentation inhumatic expressions and word play that can't translate that play into other languages or are not relevant for that culture. And then also the lack of traditional economic structures to support development. Things like actually with definitions that dictate what words are okay to use and we're not okay to use. Sometimes they do come in handy. So okay. So also we have so dialectical variations in complex things as simple as the localization spelled with a z in US instead of with an s in UK or use of computadora or ordenador in Spanish. So those might be small differences that people account for very easily. Sometimes dialectical differences are significant enough that they can cause a lot of confusion or there's a transition to be seen as very inappropriate and can affect whether or not somebody feels comfortable using input technology. Other things that you learn by communicating with your target communities and whether or not there's high rates of illiteracy and you want to focus on using symbols icons as opposed to using a lot of text. If a culture is an oral culture and for having content that's audio-visual as opposed to written. Cultural relevance of design in some user research that Second News did in Tibet with Tibetan diaspora and they were looking at a panic button application and the panic button was actually a biohazard symbol that was white. First of all, nobody understood biohazard symbol and also white was interpreted as a color for purity and peace. So if you're like, oh, this must be a good button. Yes, delete all of my content. So also a unique technical specifications might come up that you can't prepare for if you're not in direct communication with communities. Burmese, for example, there is a unicode font for Burmese which is available. However, the vast majority of Burmese still prefer to use a non-unicode font called Zaoji. So your application might be translated in unicode font to develop a unicode font but if people can't input text using non-unicode font, it's going to be very difficult for them to use the tool. So I'm kind of, lastly, and I'm like, I really botched this and I'm not going to get into everything. But another thing that we really focus on at localization lab is life after localization. So how do you actually communicate? How do you actually share these tools with your communities? How do you train people on how to use these tools using regional and cultural and culturally relevant tools? This is an example, we had a Japanese group that localized onion browser into Japanese and afterward they created Twitter accounts so they could talk about onion browser in Japanese to a Japanese audience. They created images like this one right here, the software destroyed censorship and this was in response to NTT which is Japanese ISP announcing that would voluntarily start websites. And then also, this is a great example of how to use culturally relevant devices that people understand to explain complex concepts. Rangoli is an art performed from the Indian subcontinent that involves using dots and lines to create intricate designs to create intricate designs. It's an art form, it's passed down to the generations and one of this individuals, I'm not even talking about that, started using Rangoli to explain how networks work with communities throughout India. So using this art form that people already felt very comfortable using to show what would a local area network look like or how does how you pass information through networks. So we're done and I did cover a lot of stuff that I was supposed to cover. But basically the key thing when I want I hope people take away from this is that a, localization is very important to reach communities around the globe and it would be that involving communities and having a lot of communication with your target end users is really important to make sure that content is actually applied using those tools that I love the most.