Translation Management Systems for Crowdsourcing

With the development of technologies and the increased flow of information, crowdsourcing is gaining more popularity and has been adopted by many companies allowing them to improve their production capacity while lowering the costs at the same time. Crowdsourcing is also happening in the translation industry as well.

Translation crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining translation services from a large group of people, usually multilingual users, especially from an online community. For example, Facebook has invited its multilingual users to translate phrases from the site pages that need to be translated. For me, there’s only a tiny difference between crowdsourced translation and volunteer translation, and that is, crowdsourced translation includes both paid and unpaid translation while volunteer translation is absolutely unpaid, even though the word “unpaid” is actually not accurate in the strict sense because it still costs money to manage the platform of crowdsourcing and the quality of translation.

Because of the difference between the forms of crowdsourced translation and traditional translation, these two practices have to be managed differently. First of all, translators in the traditional translation environment often use complicated CAT tools which can be expensive and hard to learn, but in crowdsourced translation environment, users should understand what to do and how to do it right way to ensure speed. In addition, traditional translation commonly has individual rates for each language while crowdsourced translation might have a single rate across languages per target quality level.

According to Jessica Roland in her article “People-powered translation at machine speed”, a TMS might have several certain features to facilitate crowdsourcing, including:

• Streamlined and intuitive systems for ordering and translating
• Reduced operations for translators and clients

And the technology should meet certain special needs, such as:

• Having an automated quality checking process
• Having a strong and flexible system so that it can handle a large crowd of translators working at the same time and the crowd can grow and shrink to accommodate various order volumes in different sizes
• Having a highly automated translator acquisition system including online feeder channels and automated online testing

After reading the three articles, I think paid translation crowdsourcing can also be counted as crowdsourcing since it still reaches out to translators and will create the products with everyone’s efforts. To manage this kind of crowdsourcing, a TMS should also have systems that deal with payment. So it should support multiple currencies and regular translator payments via international payment methods such as Paypal and should have simple, transparent pricing and efficient payment systems for quotes and invoices.

I think one of the best things for translation crowdsourcing is that the crowd will often self-correct and manage QA on its own. Users tend to let us know which translations or translators they disapprove of. Facebook utilized this idea quite well and they let other users vote on the submissions by other translators or submit their own version rather than let their own internal QA people to do the job. Therefore, a good TMS to manage crowdsourced translation would also provide a platform for the crowd to evaluate each other’s work.