If you were following the events in Egypt on Twitter and other social media and are not an Arabic speaker, chances are you were depending on near-real-time translation services provided through communities of volunteers that sprouted up with the speed of a flashmob. Welcome to the Brave New World of crowdsourced translation, a new model for localizing content that’s spreading from the edges of the Web to the business plans of increasing numbers of global companies.
Translation of online content typically falls into two categories: the very high end, where human experts are required to capture precision and subtlety, or the low end, where rough-and-ready machine translation can give readers the gist of a few paragraphs, give or take some comical errors. Now more organizations are experimenting with a third option: crowdsourced translation. This method relies on online communities to localize content into their native languages, distributing the workload across dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of contributors for greater speed, broader consensus on meaning, and lower cost.
Crowdsourced translation has been most successful on sites with strong communities and compelling content. Global Voices, the international community of news-and-events bloggers, depends on members and contributors to translate a large daily volume of multilingual content through its cunning Lingua
program. The TED Open Translation Project aims to create subtitles and transcripts to TEDTalks in more than 40 languages. Even Facebook users got into the act, putting the Facebook interface into languages ranging from the real but little-spoken Frisian dialect of Lower Saxony to fanciful “Pirate” English.
Typical of other massively collaborative communities like Wikipedia, these efforts repay their volunteers in personal satisfaction, social recognition, and the prestige of being affiliated with a worthwhile project -- everything but actual money. They also deliver an extremely valuable service to an organization at much greater speed and accuracy than it could otherwise afford.
Cheaper, faster, better... What’s not to like?
If you’re a professional translator, plenty.
The American Translators Association (ATA) has been warily watching the crowdsourcing trend for some time. They have no problem with volunteer efforts for good causes, but they are concerned about big commercial companies getting into the act. In the ATA’s view, what may look like a boon to multinational content providers and consumers suspiciously resembles Tom Sawyer’s famous scam of getting the kids from the neighborhood to whitewash his fence.
In 2009, the organization publicly took LinkedIn to task for trying to recruit volunteers from its network to localize content, rather than pay professional translators to do the work. “Linkedin is entering hazardous waters by attempting to use volunteers to perform professional services whose results will have a direct impact on the branding, image, and professionalism of a company that claims to be the premier professional networking site on the Web,” said ATA President Jan Stejskal at the time.
Some companies are taking the message to heart. Lionbridge Technologies Inc. , a large localization company based in Massachusetts, has been developing a model that seeks to blend the efficiencies of crowdsourcing with the high caliber of professional translation services. The company recruits specially selected communities of paid translators in its markets, rather than relying on volunteers, according to Nathalie Moliña-Niño, senior strategist behind Lionbridge’s crowdsourcing initiative. It then provides a lot of specialized back-end infrastructure, such as online glossaries and machine-assisted translation, to bolster the productivity of the community.
This rent-a-crowd approach seems like a good compromise, even if it results in lighter workloads for individual translators. Professionals get paid for their skills; organizations can count on high standards and reliable efforts on the kind of ordinary technical and legal projects that consume most localization budgets; and clients can still benefit from greater speed and reduced costs.
Crowdsourced translation not only points the way forward to a more global, multilingual Web, it’s also an interesting template for domesticating mass collaboration for professional, productive use without exploiting the good will of volunteers or compromising the added value of the community.
For professional documents / content, I completely agree. This middle ground makes perfect sense. I would never rely on any professional content to be translated into other languages by volunteers as it is exceptionally unlikely that it would represent a professional final transalation.
"Crowdsourcing translation works by taking a word or phrase - such as "hashtag" or "Privacy Policy" - and asking for input and feedback on translations. The community then agrees on the best possible translation. You can sign up to help translate Twitter - its mobile and websites, its apps, its help and business centers."
"They are more concerned about outsourcing (to low-wage countries) as opposed to crowdsourcing."
I don't see why they should worry. I suppose that people involved in the translations are from different countries around the world. Using them to translate documents isn't already a kind of outsourcing?
I spoke to a couple of translators for this piece but didn't have room to get the quotes in. They said that the vast majority of their paid work is legal documents, technical manuals, journal articles -- basically, stuff that no one in their right mind would do without being paid. They don't have issues being part of a team or a crowd, and they don't care much about machine translation as long as the technology requires some human oversight to correct errors, as long as they get paid their hourly rates and can fill their schedules. They are more concerned about outsourcing (to low-wage countries) as opposed to crowdsourcing.
The place where crowdsourced translation has the biggest impact is online content, especially time-sensitive things like blog posts and tweets. It's not like this is work that would be professionally translated anyway. if it gets localized at all, it has to be something fast and cheap.
As a professional writer a lot of this stuff does give me hives. On one hand I know that it means I have to constantly update my own value proposition, so to speak, to clients. That's not an issue for just writeres and translators, and it's just part of doing business. None of us is owed the right to keep doing business exactly the way we have been (let's remind the entertainment industry of this).
On the other hand, I do think those businesses that take advantage of people will eventually pay one way or another. Any crowdsourcing risks that some group will game the system, or that no one has enough real understanding and the content is bad and brand-damaging ...
Given my obvious conflict of interest it is hard to take a step back as I wonder how I'm going to make a living. If I was a translator, I'd be just as worried. But we also have to keep in mind that crowdsourcing isn't always lost revenue. In some cases, organizations simply couldn't afford to translate and so wouldn't. But for those who can ... presenting it as them owing translators paying work isn't going to do the job. You have to be able to show them why it's better to pay a professional. Perhaps that's where writers' and translators' orgs really need to start focusing, on things like case studies.
In the case of writers, there were plenty of publications out to scam people into free writing way before the Internet. When someone goes on and on about how much exposure I'll get by writing for them, I like to point out that exposure is what I'll die from when I can't pay my mortgage. :P It's not that I'll never write for free, say for a charitable organization, but many claiming awesome exposure are really over-hyping themselves.
Very complex issues. So many business models in turmoil. So many of us with bills.
Well, what is the solution for professional translators? I was thinking about this issue in general on the subway this morning, coming up with some thoughts for a blog on the subject of the proliferation of free content/information, and when I started reading your blog my first thought was "are these people being paid?"
When you consider things like what you describe here, or Wikipedia, or sites like the Huffington Post, which all thrive on volunteers, don't we have something to worry about? Or should the attitude be, as long as people are willing to do this for free, who cares?
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