The Benefits and Drawbacks of Crowdsourcing Translation

Internet and social media have brought people closer to each other, laying ground works for new ways of collaborating. One of which is crowdsourcing translation. A practice of engagement which gathers talents from all walks of life for a common purpose. This type of crowdsourcing is usually web-based, so members can post, edit and share potential translations in the most convenient way as possible. As a student translator it is alway exciting to learn about new technology and team work in the field of translation studies. Instead of independent work, people are now sharing the workloads and have managed to provide some incredible translations that are simple, quick and cheap.

The term ‘crowdsourcing’ was coined in May 2006, when a journalist by the name of Jeff Howard wrote an article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” for the Wired Magazine Crowdsourcing is the act of “taking a job traditionally performed by a designated employee and outsourcing it to undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call”, using the internet. From this definition, we know that a crowd could come together to accomplish complex projects in a way that was never possible in larger corporations. Translation has traditionally been kept in a silo, where only professional translators would perform the work. Crowdsourcing opens up this silo, so all people whether they are hobbyists, volunteers, students or anyone who has a vast interests in translation, but never had an opportunity to do so, to be involved in a translation project. Prime example of this would be Ted, an industry that invites volunteers to translate original transcripts. During the translation process volunteers are free to consult online materials as well as the knowledge of peers in the hope of providing “a diverse patchwork of quality, adequacy” and usability. A special team consists of more experienced volunteers is assembled to review, edit and modify the final translation before it is published. With our growing connectivity, it is easier than ever for individuals to collectively contribute, whether with ideas or expertise. In addition, crowdsourced translation initiatives also served as “training environments” for beginners to improve their techniques.

The popular use of social media such as Facebook, twitter and blog allow users to register, create profile and share their daily activities “from practical campaigns to last night’s dinner”. Although English was considered as a dominated language on internet, nowadays it only account for 53.2% of its content. In 2008, Facebook launched its first open translation project to the public. The company realised that to achieve internalisation they must expand outside America. Up until that point Facebook was only available in English. But translating a site and localising it can be an extremely expansive and time consuming process. With this in mind, Facebook encouraged all users, including my brother and his friends, to participant in this massive project. At the time when they did this there were about 2,400 phrases that needed to be translated in order to have Facebook available in a different language. To make the translating process easier for users, the company built a translation app on top of the Facebook platform. Once the app is installed and activated, every word that needs to be translated gets highlighted. People can click on a word and vote on the translation that others have already submitted beforehand. The company apply crowdsource translation to empower users, giving them the ability to translate the site at an incredible speed from having only English to many languages. In my opinion, crowdsourcing is about leveraging the “wisdom of crowds”, a distributed problem-solving and production model that can be handy for certain project. Decisions of an aggregated group of people are often better than what any of them could come up with individually.

Although crowdsource translation has many benefits, its potential drawbacks are hard to ignore. Searching through the internet I realised that crowdsourcing provides good quality online translation, but not the best. Crowdsourced projects are usually done on a voluntary basis. Most of the volunteers do not have much experience in the industry and what draws them to the project is often pure interest. Wikipedia is one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing, it’s accuracy often comes into question. Apparently in a translated version of wikipedia, David Beckham was a Chinese goalkeeper in the 18th century. There is no guarantee that the outcomes from crowdsourcing are credible or accurate. In 2012, Julie McDonough Ddmaya’s ‘Wikipedia Survey’ showed that out of 73 wikipedians, 86% respondents received no formal training in translation, 30% respondents had formal training in translation, and only 9% respondents received additional assistance from professional translators. The low percentages might suggest that the translating skills among wikipedians are imbalanced, therefore it is always difficult to “achieve the same level of consistency and quality” when compared to professionals.

In 2017, Jimenez-Crespo stated that crowdsourcing enables “better solutions to existing problems”, suggesting that crowdsourcing has changed the way we hire, work, think and make. With internet, people are able to collaborate together and self organise into productive units which normally take mangers or corporations to establish. What we see in successful crowdsourcing projects such as Ted and Facebook is that they were formed by people who are formally known as customers, audiences and users. In fact, most contents on our social media are translated by users with social media literacy rather than professional translators. Like what O’Hagan stated: “Translation on the basis of their knowledge of the given language as well as that of particular media content or genre, spurred by their substantial interest in the topic”. Crowdsourcing does not eradicate businesses, but changes their format, pushing companies to approach their users as potential partners. However, crowdsourcing can also be a high-risk option due to its inconsistent and sometimes inaccurate outcome. Hence, it might not be a suitable approach that will work for every type of organisation, project or content. Future industry would need to apply stricter review and editing approach if they wish to overcome this hurdle.