Crowdsourcing is one of the hottest trends on the Internet and in the translation industry. As anyone in the translation business knows, there are lots of underemployed translators and people with good language skills out there that have time on their hands. So why not harness this huge workforce to translate masses of text?
Many people are speaking out against crowdsourcing translations for various reasons. But I can think of five reasons why it will catch on in a big way. The reasons are: IBM, Google, Twitter, Facebook and Wordpress. Big companies become successful by making the right decisions. And they set the trends that other companies follow. Now even a successful company can be wrong once in a while. But can five of the biggest and most influential companies all be wrong? It is unlikely.
IBM n.Fluent. In order to develop a high quality, secure machine translation for its own use, IBM launched the n.Fluent project to build a multilingual translation corpus from its international workforce of 400,000 employees. Read more information in a previous post from the GTS Blog.
Twitter. The micro-blogging platform is turning to the masses to translate its user-interface into numerous languages. Read more information in a previous post from the GTS Blog.
Facebook. This social network is also turning to the masses to translate its user-interface into numerous languages. Facebook even released its own translation platform to the public and called it Translations for Facebook Connect.
Google. Perhaps the biggest translation crowdsourcing project of all time, Google asks every user to suggest a better translation when they use Google Translate. Google also encourages users of Google Translation Toolkit to upload translation memories and glossaries in order to improve the quality of their machine translation system.
Wordpress. The leader in blog publishing is embarked in a large scale translation crowdsourcing project, and its website is published in over 100 languages (read about it here). Not only that, many of Wordpress’ recent blog posts are translated into various languages by volunteers.
The very concept of translation crowdsourcing has many professional translators and translation agency managers running scared. And for good reason: why should anyone pay money for something you can get for free? But fear aside, the translation crowdsourcing train can not be stopped and translation professionals will have to adjust to the new situation if they want to remain competitive.
What do you feel about this topic? Do you agree that it will gain momentum and become an industry standard? As a language professional, are you worried about it or do you feel it can help the industry? I would like to hear your thoughts.
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