After learning about the best practices to adopt community translation and translation crowdsourcing in localization projects, my teammates and I came up with a community translation proposal to Codecademy. In our proposal, we demonstrate the reasons that Codecademy should adopt community translation, how they can perform prioritization in the project, how to improve the quantity and quality of translation in the project, and what are the costs that might incurred in the project.
Codecademy Community Translation Proposal
As an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes, Codecademy is gaining popularity among programming language learners around the world. For Codecademy to seize this opportunity and expand its reach globally, the company has to start considering different localization solutions. Our team believes that community translation will be a great localization solution for Codecademy for the following reasons:
- Demand for localization from the international users
Our research shows that Codecademy has a very active multilingual forum for users who speak languages other than English. However, users’ posts suggest that, aside from discussing problems they encountered in their own languages, they also really look forward to learning Codecademy’s online courses in their native languages. Therefore, we are positive that there is a demand for localization from the users.
- Existing resources that can be leveraged in community translation
In addition to requesting for localized version of the website, the multilingual users of Codecademy also offer help for translation on the forum. This is a strong indicator that demonstrate why community translation is a suitable solution for Codecademy. As the success of community translation relies on a devoted crowd base, the passionate users of Codecademy have the potential to become valuable contributors in translation projects.
- The nature of Codecademy makes it very appealing to the crowd
Although Codecademy is a for-profit company, it offers free programming educations to users around the world. Therefore, we believe that the nature of Codecademy makes it seem appealing to the volunteers contributing to the work of non-profit organizations, which means that more people are willing to be involved in the community translation project.
Recommendations for prioritization
In order to identify the most suitable materials for community translation, our team has several recommendations for prioritization.
- Prioritization based on visibility
The volunteers are more willing to contribute to the localization project when the contents they help localize are visible. Also, Codecademy’s homepage and the starter kit on the website are the first point of contact for users from different locale. Therefore, we believe that prioritizing these contents in community translation project is of great importance to the success of the whole project.
- Prioritization based on popularity and the level of difficulty of the courses
We believe that, in order to maximize the impact of localization project, we can start with the most popular courses on Codecademy based on the site traffic data. In addition, as most of Codecademy’s users are novices in terms of programming languages, we believe translating introductory courses in each programming language (i.e. Python, JavaScript, C++) should also be a top priority for the localization team.
- Identify Core languages
We believe that the impact of the localization project can be maximized by prioritizing core languages based on user geographic. For instance, the French community, Spanish community, and Portuguese community are among the most active communities on Codecademy’s forum. Hence, it would be logical to select French, Spanish, Portuguese as primary target languages for localization.
Recommendations to optimize the quantity of translation
To improve the quantity of community translation, our first practice is to bring the right source to the right community. In our case, since CodeAcademy already has an existing forum, international block, where a lot of their users gather and talk about the courses and even offer to help translate, so promotion here will definitely help us find volunteers who know both the content and the language.
Secondly, we want to be connected and engaged with the community. We are thinking about assigning active users as community managers, who could bridge the community and the company. If we are going to use a specific tool, we’ll make sure all the volunteers know how to use it, which means that they will have the training they need. We would also consider regional face-to-face meet-ups.
Another thing we can do is micro-task. By breaking up the work into small chunks, it could enhance the confidence and efficiency of the translators.
For rewards, we want to offer them something that they really need or could be beneficial for them. For volunteers who have finished a certain amount of translation, they will be able to have access to courses that are only limited to pro-members. Also, depending on the amount and quality of their work, there will be professional certificates or a badge granted to them, so they can cite their contribution on resumes.
Recommendations to optimize the quality of translation
In addition to generating a satisfying amount of translation, it’s crucial to have translation of satisfying quality too. Otherwise, the poorly translated content might not only fail to achieve our original educational and marketing goals, but also do enormous harm to the brand image. To safeguard and boost the quality of the content translated by the non-professional community, we have designed several solutions for Codecademy:
- Interactive Training Process
It goes without saying that contributors must develop an understanding of the content and also acquire basic translation skills before they can provide quality translation.
For starters, to make sure translators have an understanding of the content, we believe translators should be recruited from the existing active user community.
For content like course materials, we advise Codecademy to stipulate that only those who finish the courses they would like to translate are eligible to translate the course content.
Moving onto building translation skills, we were inspired by the LegoDragon training Google designed for its linguists and came up with the idea to combine the initial training and screening process together in gamified activities.
Our proposal is to create short interactive courses on elements listed in style guide (like tone, punctuation, and tags), glossary (ideally created by Codecademy employees who are already product experts, including course advisor, coaches, and content creators), tools, and workflow (like rating schemes). After contributors finish the short courses, they will have to pass a test before diving into translation. Since our goal is to include every community member who would like to make contribution, we recommend Codecademy to provide unlimited attempts for members to take the courses and a test, so if they cannot pass the test in their first try, they can take it as many times as they want. That way, we kill two birds with one stone! We do not turn any members down and we make sure our contributors are fully qualified.
- Built-in Automatic QA Feature
It saves a lot of time and effort in the editing and proofreading stage if we integrate the right CAT tool that comes with essential QA feature (with spell, grammar, punctuation, and tag checks) onto the collaborative translation platform. Ideally, the QA feature should run automatically after confirming segments, saving contributing translators extra time to go through translation again. Based on our research, Lilt (https://lilt.com) seems to be the best choice on the market because it is one of the most intuitive, user-friendly tools and it also comes with an Auto QA feature.
- 3 Reviewing Approaches
In addition to the above-mentioned QA in the translation stage, we also suggest Codecademy to incorporate community voting and/or a final review conducted by professional translators and reviewers to make sure the translation result align with the demand of users and avoid any extra errors. Community voting system has proved to be successful in many crowdsourcing and community translation cases. The voting and flagging in Translate Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/translations) and the validating in Google Translate Community are the 2 most significant examples. Nevertheless, the publishing timeframe of translation outputs will be more difficult to control for companies, so hiring professionals to review is also a good workaround worth considering. If possible, Codecademy might even be able to invite its employees who are already product experts to review the content too.
- Raising Quality Awareness Through Level-Up
Most crowdsourcing and community translation platforms evaluate contribution by amount. We argue that the quality of translation is equally or even more important than the amount of translation, so taking approved/rejected segment ratio and error statistics into account while building the gamified leveling up structure might be a great way to stress the importance of quality in the community.
- Reliable Community Managers
Existing managers of the Codecademy learner community and contributors with more experiences and better performances can become translator community managers. As reliable points of contact, they can provide answers to questions and make sure contributors abide by community guidelines.
Estimated costs and how to cover those costs
Since this is not for-profit project, it is crucial to estimate
initial cost and manage budget efficiently. The first and the most urgent
consideration is recruiting cost. Although getting talented volunteers involved
is important, we also have to try to minimize the cost of hiring campaign.
Luckily, Codecademy already has community pages by locales with active users.
Utilizing these pages for recruiting and marketing, we can reduce initial
costs.
Next consideration is the cost for building platforms. For training
non-professional translators, effective onborading system is essential. One of
the answers is establishing gamified training tools. As a initial cost, there
is building proper infrastructure cost, such as data storage, and once it is
accomplished, operations and managing the community consume budget in the
long-term. To ensure quality translation, it is needed to hire professional
reviewers who can work on quality assurance.
We have to remember this is a localization project. For localization and internationalization,
DTP with layout and format will cost. Lastly, for our devoted community
translators, rewards have to be provided, such as pro-membership and schwags.
Then, what results we can expect from this community translation? First of all,
all the strings on user interface and prioritized materials will be translated
into core languages based on the site traffic. As a result, a robust and
sustainable system is established and then it will facilitate a future
localization. And last but not least, community translation will help establish
an active translation volunteer community and engage with users while boosting
brand loyalty, raising brand awareness, growing potential paid membership. All
these efforts will lead to market expansion to other locales.
Link to our presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkzL6pvaDTw&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR1xZW27u1DwVYd8hQbzo0KEtW2W4Qc2aF8VWrFQY4lZ-OVszGpOuwCNtY8
