One of the things I love most about security awareness is the international aspect. Every culture and nationality is different, and you have to take that into account when when developing your awareness program. Language and translation is one of the most challenging. For many cultures, language is part of their identity. In English we tend to say people speak "good" English or "bad" English. For many other languages one does not speak good or bad, but "beautiful", it has a certain rythm and flow, almost like poetry. Trying to achieve that in translation, especially for security awareness training, is extremely difficult. Very old or traditional languages have a very hard time translating security terms, such as Arabic. Other languages tend to be much longer then English. A video that is 3 minutes long in English can easily be four minutes long in Polish. As such, translation is actually one of the hardest parts I find in effective awareness training. But I'm a passionate believer in it. Security awareness is a global problem, as such we have to reach people around the world. And the most effective way to reach them is in their local language. As such, every week we are releasing a free security awareness video on Social Engineering in new languages. You can vote on your language on our Facebook page. So far we have released the videos in the following languages.
Stay tuned on our YouTube channel as we continue to post more languages in the coming weeks.
About the Author
Lance Spitzner
Director, SANS Security Awareness
Lance has over 20 years of security experience in cyber threat research, awareness and training. He invented the concept of honeynets, founded the Honeynet Project and helped pioneer the field of cyber intelligence. Lance has published three security books, consulted in over 25 countries and helped hundreds of organizations establish mature security awareness programs. Lance serves on the Board for the NCSA, is a frequent presenter, serial tweeter ( @lspitzner ) and works on numerous community security projects. He served as an armor officer in the Army's Rapid Deployment Force and earned his MBA from the University of Illinois.