Weglot AI Translation and Accessibility

noah05

My team is deciding on a translation strategy and is leaning towards an automatic solution like Weglot. We've tried native translation in the past and it's very expensive and hard to keep on top of with the size of our team.

Accessibility is a top priority. My question is, has anyone used Weglot or a tool like it for translation? Did you run into any accessibility concerns? Does it reliably translate aria labels?

Jessica Mccall

Hi @noah05 

Esri has not used Weglot AI. But we do have extensive experience in the use of Machine Translation (MT), and we can share some basic guidelines:

• MT is a valuable tool that should be part of your strategy as a solution to decrease the overall localization costs and time to market for your content.
• Certain content types are not the best candidates for the use of MT, such us UI, and a couple of words without enough context, etc., which I believe could be the use case for the aria labels. The result of MT in those use cases could be misleading or error prone.
• Depending on your target audience and languages, human post-editing for your customer-facing content should be part of your workflow to provide a good user experience.

If you would further insight on this topic, you may contact us at globalization@esri.com and we can set up a call to further assist you.