Article published In:
Digital Translation
Vol. 11:1 (2024) ► pp.1–24

Cultural ergonomics in localization

Engineering a more inclusive language product

| National Taiwan University

Cultural ergonomics aims to integrate the dimension of culture into systems and products to make them safer, more useful, and more accessible to a wider range of multicultural users. This makes it an effective conceptual tool to create a localized product that is more inclusive. By using the example of security questions in drop-down menus replicated across North American English websites, this paper argues that overlooking ‘culture’ as a site of diverse experiences leads to a harder-to-navigate product for the multicultural user. By juxtaposing the reality of a multicultural context with the monoethnic, middle-class, and heteronormative cultural dimensions of security questions, the cloning of questions across websites can be seen as satisfying the needs of the dominant power rather than the subordinated peoples – both immigrant and non-heteronormative. Operationalizing cultural ergonomics in the translation workflow provides a means to recognize and address this power imbalance.

Keywords: culture, ergonomics, localization, translation, immigrant, heteronormative
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Security questions
    • 2.1Canada revenue agency security questions
    • 2.2Commercial airline security questions
    • 2.3Chinese security questions
  • 3.Cultural ergonomics and the multicultural context
    • 3.1The monoethnic user at the center of ergonomics
    • 3.2The multicultural user in the immigration context
  • 4.Cultural ergonomics for user empowerment
    • 4.1Own framing of questions and answers
    • 4.2Translation workflow and sensitivity reading
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 July 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dt.00011.tsa
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