The idea of crowdsourcing has been around for a long time. If you do a Google search, you will find that crowdsourcing generally means the practice of effectively harnessing the crowds’ input to accomplish a certain goal. Nowadays, this is usually done unpaid over the internet because it is so much easier to reach such a big crowd on the internet, and paying such a huge crowd just does not make any business sense. Conversely, traditional translation projects have been done in a paid format by engaging only a small group of professional translators. When presented with these two options, it is only natural that people want to carry out translation projects in a crowdsourcing manner, hence the term: translation crowdsourcing.
The idea is feasible. Many international companies, such as Adobe and Facebook, have put it in practice and obtained significantly positive results, and their success is not accidental. In order to replace the traditional translation project workflow with translation crowdsourcing, we need to identify what is good about the traditional way. There are many advantages about the traditional translation project workflow. This article will discuss the two main points, assured quantity and quality, and identify best practices for a translation crowdsourcing project to achieve the same, or even higher, level of quantity and quality. Besides framing the discussion about best practices around quality and quantity, this article also only looks at translation projects that otherwise would not have been done if the companies did not opt for crowdsourcing.
Increase quantity by marketing and motivating
Paid professional translators are subject to contract terms, so a certain throughput can be expected from them over a period of time. However, this does not apply to unpaid crowds. There are two main ways that one can go about making sure of the quantity of work produced by unpaid crowds.
The first way is through “marketing.” The crowd cannot start translating for you if they do not even know about it. Marketing your translation crowdsourcing initiative to the right crowd as if it were a product is the first and foremost step to get it off the ground. A successful marketing strategy encompasses a solid marketing mix: price, product, promotion, and place. Identify what the crowd would have spent their time on (price), what they can get out of offering their labor for free (product), how and to which specific crowd you will promote your initiative (promotion), and where you would like your translation crowdsourcing to take place (place). Having these clearly defined can give you the biggest crowd.
Let’s take a look at an example. If a non-profit of preventing starvation has extreme budget limits and would like to opt for crowdsourcing to translate their short flyers from zh-TW into Japanese, the marketing mix would look something like this:
- Price: If one short flyer roughly needs 1 hour to translate, the price would be a hour of the translator’s salary (if they translate during their work hours) or one hour of their leisure time, such as watching YouTube.
- Product: A sense of achievement that the translator has contributed to starvation prevention.
- Promotion: Post recruiting announcements on human rights forums since this group of people are more likely to join this translation crowdsourcing initiative.
- Place: An online platform that allows people from everywhere to join.
After listing the marketing mix out, you can then carry out your marketing plan.
After you have them on-board, keeping them motivated is key to continuous high quantity. It is important to note that the crowd knew it would be unpaid, so using monetary rewards to motivate them at this point would send out a confusing message about your initiative and defeat the purpose of setting up an unpaid crowdsourcing project in the first place. People usually volunteer for a sense of giving back to the community or accomplishment. Therefore, any form of recognition is more appropriate in such circumstances.
Another good way to motivate your crowd is to show them the impact they have made. This will give them an incomparable sense of accomplishment and is more effective than any monetary rewards.
As mentioned in the beginning, a successful translation crowdsourcing needs more than a motivated crowd. How to maintain the quality of the work produced by the crowd is also crucial.
Maintain quality
Although the volunteerism nature of a translation crowdsourcing makes it harder to conduct quality control as opposed to the traditional translation projects, there are still measures that can be put in place before, during, and after to maintain the translation quality.
Before
When it comes to quality control measures at this stage, it might be tempting to vet the crowd the same way as a traditional translation project. For an unpaid translation crowdsourcing initiative, however, this might not be the answer since it could discourage people from even taking part in this crowdsourcing.
Instead of requiring them to have certain knowledge, a more appropriate approach is to provide them the knowledge as they translate. For example, some people might not even know the importance of consistent usage of terminology. Instead of shutting those volunteers out by testing them in the beginning, arrange mini trainings when they use your tool to translate and familiarize them with this concept. This approach also resonates with the product concept we talked about earlier; it would motivate the crowd to participate if they can learn something new by offering their labor for free.
Another aspect that at first glance might seem irrelevant to quality is to make sure your technology is easy to use. For example, even if they learn the concept of consistent terminology, how they could put it in practice if they cannot find the button to store a word into the terminology list? Therefore, the ease of using the technology plays an important role in quality control.
During
Although it is not recommended to conduct linguistic tests at the “before" stage, it is not to say that there is no way to maintain linguistic quality. Voting mechanism can come in handy in this situation. Allowing volunteers to vote on translations provided by other volunteers makes sure that other people’s work is reviewed. This mechanism also provides one more way to contribute to the project. Additionally, this practice means that their hard work will be publicly shared, and they need to take it seriously in order to pass each other’s scrutiny.
Besides this, the best practices of providing context and answering questions for traditional translation projects are also applicable. After all, you cannot translate what you do not understand.
After
If you think the quality could be better and would like to add one more layer of check at this stage, you can do it by either hiring a professional reviewer or enlisting the crowd again.
The amount of work produced by your crowd is likely to be huge. It might not make business sense to hire a professional reviewer and review it all. However, you can do a sampling and only review part of it to gauge the quality.
You can also have reporting mechanism ready for your end-users to report bugs or issues they encounter; start with crowdsourcing and end with crowdsourcing. Be careful about this approach because the users might not appreciate a faulty release.
Summary and final thoughts
Let’s recap the important points about the best practices for quality and quantity when it comes to an unpaid translation crowdsourcing that would not have been completed.
- Maintain quantity
- a clear marketing mix
- a highly motivated crowd
- Maintain quality
- before
- provide training opportunities
- have easy to use technology in place
- during
- establish a voting mechanism
- provide context
- establish a query management system
- after
- hire professional reviewers
- establish a user reporting mechanism
- before
Translation crowdsourcing projects are not all about getting translation for free and saving money. The efforts that are put into managing the projects, and the backlash from the public due to some companies’ for-profit business models have all shown how difficult it could be to successfully launch and finish a translation crowdsourcing project. If done right, however, it can be a tremendous boost for your entity.