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Australian Centre for Disability Law's (ACDL) Learning Together Toolkit provides tips and resources for students with disability to get the help they need in education. Ethnolink worked together with ACDL to translate 6 Easy Read Guides into 4 languages, helping ACDL bridge communication barriers and bring their important resources to high-need communities.
Australian Centre for Disability Law (ACDL) is a not-for-profit organisation created with a vision of a society in which persons with disability live with dignity, and in which their human rights and fundamental freedoms are recognised, respected, protected and fulfilled. ACDL offers a range of services and resources, including legal advice, law reform, casework and more.
ACDL's aim was to bring their resources to communities who would need them most. To do so effectively, it was important to ensure that the resouces were written in a way that is respectful and inclusive of the experiences of their target audience. Additionally, as the topics within the resources and toolkit centred on students with disability and their families, we were especially aware that the translations should be treated with respect and sensitivity. Such topics can be particularly challenging to discuss in some communities where these topics could be viewed as inappropriate or rude to discuss publicly.
To ensure that ACDL's resources were translated appropriately, Ethnolink crafted a solution that included community checking, a premium quality assurance method that engages community members to review and provide feedback on translated documents. Our community members were members of ACDL's target audience, which ensured that the final documents were culturally and linguistically appropriate.
For the most part, the feedback that we received through community checking was overwhelmingly positive. There was one instance where a community checker felt that the term used for 'support worker' should be substituted for another, more commonly used term. However, upon returning to our translator, the final decision was made that the suggested term was too colloquial and inconsistent with the tone and purpose of the material. Nevertheless, this is an excellent example of the importance of community checking, as it brings together the different perspectives offered by community members and professional translators. Ultimately, by working together with community members, we were proud to deliver to ACDL a set of 24 culturally and linguistically appropriate translated Guides (6 Easy Read Guides in 4 languages each) that had been fully reviewed by both professionals and members of the community.
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