Monotropism

Translating this site

Sculpture of a slug-like creature reading a book
Reading can be a challenge when you’re still learning a language.

If you’re potentially interested in translating any of the materials on this site into your own language, please sign up here!

Reaching an international audience is a high priority for me (Fergus). In much of the world, non-autistic specialists dominate the discourse around autism even more than they do in the English-speaking world. This is probably because autistic communities spread across different countries have often defaulted to English, as the most commonly spoken language. Autistic people in English-speaking countries have benefited greatly from the ideas that have been generated and spread in this way. Everyone stands to gain from the free flow of ideas between different language communities, so effective translation of autistic writers has great potential to help autistic people around the world!

Alert readers may have noticed that there is a drop-down menu of languages discreetly placed in the bottom-left of each page on this site. The reason it’s tucked away in a corner like this is because the existing translations have all been done by AI. While automatic translation has come a long way in recent years, we really want them to be checked by humans before too many people see them!

At the moment, all of the in-site links (outside of the main menu) will take visitors back to the English version of the site. There are also doubtless many mistakes in the translations as they stand, and there are some terms and ideas for which accepted equivalents do not yet exist in every language.

For this reason, we are inviting volunteers to help correct and expand the translation – a project that Joni Elena is leading on. Joni is a professional translator and web localisation specialist, as well as a fluent Spanish speaker. While we can’t currently offer translators money, she thought this could at least be a good opportunity for some autistic people to get a little bit of translation and localisation experience and training. This sort of work suits many autistic people well.

At the time of writing, we are up to 24 volunteer translators, with 17 languages between them! Several languages have more than one person looking at them, which is ideal – especially with less experienced translators, or where vocabulary is being translated for the first time.

That translator sign-up form again:

https://forms.clickup.com/36838868/f/1347em-1142/4JOVDZ628OEFF2CM4S


Please consider whether an email makes more sense than a public comment!

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