Description
Localizing healthcare websites
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the need for reliable medical information accessible to everyone. In website translation, this is achieved through localizing medical content by mainly focusing on website end users, people who would otherwise have no access to the information provided in the websites, had it not been for localization. The purpose of the study is to enrich knowledge on the very practical and rather under-researched issue of localization of medical content in Greece. The study argues that several medical-content websites have been adapted to meet the needs of Greek end users. However, even when transcreated, the Greek version of these websites does not fulfill the higher standards of localization, as their more specialized medical content is not at all localized. The study discusses the reasons why this is the case and explores implications on Greek end users and public health. The data set draws on webpages of global pharmaceutical companies addressing Greek-speaking audie¬nces. We analyze front-end level characteristics based on the criteria of Singh and Pereira (2005) and Singh et al. (2012) for assessing the level of localization. Descriptive/interpretative analysis shows that all the websites in the data set have adopted a localization strategy to different degrees as expected, thus confirming the main hypothesis. Answers to the research questions pertaining to the reasons and the implications of this phenomenon, can only be hypothetical as results are insufficient for reaching a definite conclusion. Keywords: localization, health websites, medical content, Greek end users.
