This course at MIIS gave me valuable insights into the use of translation crowdsourcing, social localization, and community translation.
Crowdsourcing, or harnessing the “crowd’s” collective wisdom, energy, talents, or resources in a streamlined or semi-automated manner for a common purpose or goal, has many surprising benefits and, in the context of translation and localization, can be employed while still maintaining a high level of quality.
Benefits of community translation include extending one’s reach to new markets, improve quality by getting feedback on terminology from the community of users who really know the products, increase scalability with many contributors able to accomplish a lot of translated words, possibly save costs, and increase engagement with the community of users. This ultimate benefit is the principal motive behind crowdsourcing.
In order to execute community translation successfully, an organization must maintain strong ties with their community, communicate regularly with the community, provide opportunities for translator recognition, and train translators as needed. Community translation is not about deciding between professionals or the crowd, but about using both and shifting roles. An example of this is the way Facebook used professional linguists to review their crowdsourced translations when needed for Quality Assurance (QA).
There are many important ways to build and maintain quality even when receiving translations from free volunteers around the globe. See the infographic below for an illustration of these points.
Similarly, in order to increase the number of translators that engage with your materials, follow the steps outlined in the infographic on Quantity below for more insight.
View the video below for a quick overview of the project.