Yi-Ping Liao's Portfolio

Category: Social/Local Translation Crowdsourcing

Mini Portfolio for Social/Local Translation Crowdsourcing

February 9, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Introduction

Crowdsourcing means harnessing the wisdom, energy, talents of the crowd in a streamlined/semi-automated manner for a common goal or purpose. In the field of localization and translation, many companies and organizations often turn to passionate volunteers for help, including Facebook, Trello, TED, Mozilla, etc. Though not necessarily more cost efficient, crowdsourcing is indeed a good way for companies to engage its users in the creation of the products and contents of the company. In this blog post, I will present the presentations and other deliverables from the course Social/Local Translation Crowdsourcing taught by Professor Adam Wooten.

Professional Presentations

Recommendations to optimize the Quantity of translation (by my teammate Lina)

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 expertsto 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.

Final Project Files:

Quality Control In Crowdsourcing and Community Translation

January 26, 2019 / / 0 Comments

How do you boost your translation quantity in translation crowd-sourcing, community translation, and social localization?

January 25, 2019 / / 0 Comments

The ideas of crowd-sourcing, community translation, and social media localization appeal to companies looking for a relatively cost-effective solution to translation or wanting to engage more users and build their own contribution communities. However,  increasing the volume of contribution to a level high enough to satisfy their needs is likely to be a tough nut to crack for beginners or those on the fence. Nevertheless, there are already several successful predecessors in the industry whose experiences are worth learning from. In this article, I will list the motivating and demotivating factors of such contribution and give out some tips for companies to boost the quantity of translation based on the best practices I’ve learned in the course Social Local/Translation Crowdsourcing.

To increase quantity of translation, the most important thing is to:

  1. Recruit more contributors through providing and advertising incentives
  2. Prevent losing contributors by avoiding as many deterrents as possible

 

Common Incentives for Translation Volunteering:

  • An opportunity of a new experience (whether in general or in the sense of professional career building)
  • A sense of fulfillment (can be reinforced and amplified by public recognition)
  • Fun (not only in the translation task itself, but also in the gamification elements like leader board and badges that facilitate friendly competition)
  • Social elements (whether it is a networking chance for volunteers to make new connections, an old connection that drives them to start volunteering, or a sense of belonging to a community)
  • Free education/training (which some novice translators or translators-to-be are looking for)
  • Internal privileges (such as a higher access level or a special user interface)
  • Perks (like free food, transportation fee, schwags, etc)
  • More personal causes such as the alignment of values

 

Common Deterrents for Translation Volunteering:

  • Poor management (eg. poor and unfair implementation and enforcement of management policies or standards)
  • Mismatched anticipation of job responsibilities and contribution goals
  • Lack of recognition
  • Low flexibility to do things whenever contributors want or how much they want (not breaking chunks of work down into micro tasks)
  • Lack of continuous communication
  • Low social motivation such as feeling they are translating/working on it alone
  • Inconsistency of motivations
  • Competing causes such as contributors finding that they can get paid elsewhere for what they are doing
  • A lack of meaningful/good enough feedback
  • Complexity of tasks (e.g. long sentences and tag issues sometimes even aggravated by not allowing contributors to skip segments)

 

 

After companies make sure that they have as many contributors in their pools as possible, here are some extra-detailed tips on how to achieve higher quantity of translation:

 

  • Make the contribution platform easy and user-friendly
    • A clear UI
    • A trouble-shooting feature (e.g. FAQs, contributor forum, issue escalation channel, etc)
    • Reference materials ready (TM, glossaries, style guide, and auto look-up feature should be in place)
  • Make the contribution process fun and a little bit competitive through gamification
    • Public recognition system (e.g. badges and leader board)
    • Visualization of the translation project progress with a thoughtful theme (e.g. city building or space exploration)
    • Progress/status updates on projects and personal records
    • Leveling up (to unlock features or a special interface and icon)
    • Social media integration (allowing contributors to invite friends and share their achievements)
  • Make it effortless for contributors to engage in the process
    • Split workload to enable both large and small contribution
    • Easy access of the translation/collaboration platforms (e.g. mobile apps)
  • Strict Implementation of public recognition and gratitude expression
    • Aforementioned recognition system and resume/professional certifications/badges that prove to the public the engagement of contributors
    • Simple gifts that stress company spirit like company logo stickers and t-shirts
    • Personal relationships through face-to-face meetings/dinner/holiday greeting cards, etc
  • Evangelize your companies and products and build a community or fandom
    • With a greater passion and belief, contributors will be able to work for you more efficiently and for a longer period of time.
    • It’s harder for contributors to stop working on the projects when their valued peers and friends continue to contribute.

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