How is Web Content in Easy Language Localised? Current Trends and Open Questions

Abstract

[EN]Access to information on the web for all has become crucial in today's digitalized society. Making it available for everyone, including people with functional, cultural and linguistic diversity (FUNCALD) (Rodríguez Vázquez and Torres del Rey, 2020) implies providing, translating and simultaneously releasing content in standard and alternative formats by default, not only by special request or law. In recent times, Easy Language (EL) has turned into a powerful linguistic tool increasingly used to achieve that goal, facilitating participation, learning and bridge building for people with intellectual disabilities (ID), as well as, according to prior work (Hansen-Schirra et al. 2020), multiple other target populations such as people with dementia or second language users, to name just a few. Despite being a key communication instrument, EL content is scarce, very often limited to isolated documents published by governmental institutions or independent organisations serving the needs of very specific population groups. In addition, while efforts have been made at a national and international level to publish standards, tools and recommendations for the creation of EL texts, these have mainly revolved around intralingual translation aspects. In our talk, we will shift the focus to multilingual contexts, paying particular attention to the Web. Concretely, we will review current strategies to create multilingual easy language content and bring forward existing technical and procedural challenges. Our ultimate goal is to pinpoint how EL fits in the web localisation landscape and understand what are the implications researchers and professionals in the field.