Crowdsourcing Translation
“Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call.” Wikipedia
“Translation Crowdsourcing” stepped into the spotlight back in 2007-2008 when Facebook decided not to engage professional translators in the localization of its content into different languages, but instead involve its immense user community. This “open call” received many enthusiastic responses and the translation result, although dodgy in some cases, was really not that bad. Of course one can easily spot the occasional inconsistent capitalization, non-localized punctuation and untranslated legal terms…
Facebook created a Translation app which, in their own words, worked as follows: “Facebook’s Translation app presents users with words that need to be translated, and they submit their entries. The system then invites other users to vote using Reddit-style up/down arrows to vote on which translations are best.” Next thing you know, FB had a localized version in more than 60 languages, for free!
As for the ethics of this process, it has been argued that it stands on the borders of legitimacy. I can’t help but thinking that a 15 year old boy from Philippines is localizing content (for free) for a multi-billion dollar business. Isn’t the result of his labour bringing “more” clients to this business? What’s in it for him or his country anyway? These questions are reasonable, although a bit exaggerated (including my comment). Crowdsourcing is here to stay and If the very fact that you enjoy a web platform makes you want to help localize it, then so be it. Why not? Of course this huge corporation could reimburse you in some way for your labour, but online communities do not really work like this, do they?
Crowdsourcing is turning into a form of Machine Translation by humans (peculiar as it may sound). I am not sure which one is better in terms of quality, as both non-professional human translators and machine translation systems tend to translate word for word. Hence I believe it’s safe to assume that it’s not likely for crowdsourcing to affect Medical, Legal, Literary or other more demanding forms of translation work, since the added quality of professional and specialized translators will always be necessary. But it will play a role (hand in hand with machine translation) in the localization of web communities, open-source software, web applications, charity and activism ….everything that gains public interest or sympathy or is just …”hip and happening”!
French Translation Edinburgh 23:16 on 28/01/2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I think they are just looking for free labour. I would advise people to be very careful on who they offer their time and effort for.