Collaboration, Community, Crowdsourcing, User-Generated Content or How Facebook Gets Free Translations

(Global Watchtower)

New concepts are entering the language services world and, as it often happens in transition periods, terminology to describe them is getting blurred. Recent news about Facebook getting translations done for free, have reinvigorated the debate.

We have discussed collaboration in translation extensively at Common Sense Advisory. For the past year and half we have made several presentations on the topic at different conferences and interviewed and discussed the issue with people who are actually doing it.

There is crowdsourcing in translation , there is community translation, but these two terms don’t describe what we see happening in the market.

Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. But this is not the phenomenon that we think is interesting for LSPs and GSBs (Globalization Service Buyers).

What we are interested in studying is how companies can use the elements of crowdsourcing in a controlled environment for working on large corporate projects in short periods of time. How collaboration increases value and reduces turnaround time.

This involves an overhaul of the traditional sequential translation process and has implications to the sourcing of people, the use of technology and the form of output of translations.