What Is Crowdsourcing?
People who are familiar with Chinese idiom may know the proverb “the Foolish Old Man, who removed the mountains”(愚公移山). It originated from an ancient story: An old man motivated his family members and villagers to successfully remove a mountain that impeded their transportation. Although the man was called “the foolish old man” for thousands of years, his idea of leveraging the power of the crowd seems to be original from the modern perspective. Nowadays, we give this concept a fancier name: crowdsourcing, which refers to the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by harnessing the power of the crowd.
Here are some suggestions for the best practices of how to motivate and how to improve the quality of crowdsourcing translation.
How to Motivate the Crowd
In order to motivate people and enlarge the group of crowdsourcing, you may need to know what you want to achieve and what kind of people you need. Besides, there are many skills and methods that we can apply to make it more creative and systematic. This infographic shows you the best practices to increase the quantity of translation crowdsourcing from these four aspects: social motivation, tools, communication, and rewards. Click here to download the pdf.
How to Keep the Translation Quality
Quality is another significant element in translation crowdsourcing. This infographic shows you how to improve quality in translation crowdsourcing during each stage, including preparation, in-translation, and after-translation. Start with the number 1, and follow the line to figure it out. Click here to download the pdf.
Translation Crowdsourcing Proposal for SFSPCA
To put the knowledge and theories of crowdsourcing into practice, I worked with Yuxin He and Qifan Chen in creating a website translation and localization crowdsourcing plan for a nongovernmental organization: SFSPCA. Our group name is: Wecare since all of us are animal lovers and care about animal rescue. We believe that “With more people get to know SFSPCA and become aware of those animal’s living conditions, more and more people would provide care or even home to those animals.”
Please click here to download our proposal and learn more about our plan for translation crowdsourcing for SFSPCA.