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Does Crowdsourcing have a Place in the Translation Industry?
The Era of Open Standards is here
Translation Tools Without Borders
Content Convergence: Come Together Write Now
Beijing’s Olympic Task: Serving Up Gold-Medal English
Does Crowdsourcing have a Place in the Translation Industry?
By Deb Kramasz
Category:
Crowdsourcing will work for translation needs only where it works for original authoring needs, because translation is essentially a writing or authoring activity in another language.
And where does crowdsourcing work for original authoring? For what document genres, if any, does it work? It may be useful for compiling the Internet’s funniest videos and a means for problem solving (technical research for tough R&D problems, grading method, patent examination), but what about original authoring?
Crowdsourcing has been successful for online open encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia.
Another possible authoring application may be in journalism, if you consider incident reports as a genre of collaborative authoring. Journalist Robert Niles, in his article “A journalist’s guide to crowdsourcing” sees the value of crowdsourcing in incident reports. “True crowdsourcing involves online applications that enable the collection, analysis and publication of reader-contributed incident reports, in real time.”
The attempt at crowdsourcing for the translation of the professional networking site Linked In was a failure. Well, actually, it failed even before a point for translation crowdsourcing could be reached. It failed because a specific group (translators) was needed for the crowdsourced translation and this group was an unwilling one. Freelance translators were unwilling to work for free.
Beyond open encyclopedias and incident reports, I have yet to see examples of successful authoring or translation using crowdsourcing.
Sources:
Wired Magazine
“The Rise of Crowdsourcing”
By Jeff Howe
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html?pg=2&topic=crowds&topic_set=
“What Is Crowdsourcing?”
by Jennifer Alsever
http://www.bnet.com/2403-13241_23-52961.html
The Chronicle of Higher Education
July 30, 2009, 06:00 PM ET
“Duke Professor Uses ‘Crowdsourcing’ to Grade”
By Erica Hendry
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Duke-Professor-Uses/7538/
The Online Journalism Review
“A journalist’s guide to crowdsourcing”
By Robert Niles
July 31, 2007
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/070731niles/
The Era of Open Standards is here
Everyone is done talking about it and is now doing it. The era of open standards has arrived. A range of open standard formats for several data types exists: .tmx, .tbx, .srx, xml:tm, .XLIFF, DITA, and the list goes on.
Open standards are software that produces outputs that are interchangeable across all applications of its type. For example, terminology software outputs a file type that is interchangeable with any other open standard terminology software or application with a terminology component.
SDL has just launched Trados Studio 2009, an open platform for a translation management system. LISA has its open standards for file formats .tmx, .tbx, .srx, xml:tm among others.
The carrot is consistent word counts, interchangeability, and same treatment of translatable text. The word counts are the same across different vendors and software programs when software developers use the same rules. Users are no longer locked into one vendor or software program when the output can be taken to another company or used in a different application. Leveraging is maximized when translatable text is recognized by any open standard tool.
The only thing left to do is use the open standards and reap the benefits.
Translation Tools Without Borders
The localization/translation tool industry is undergoing a revolution. With the very real possibility of WorldServer being phased out as we know it, content owners are currently perched at the edge of the cliff of proprietary translation memory tools, ready to fly free of vendor software that locks their assets into a single translation vendor.
But content owners are first looking for which direction in the new field of open standards before making the leap.
Already major localization tool vendors are rolling out their new platforms based on open standards, ready to catch those that make the leap. SDL is promoting its new open architecture called Trados Studio 2009. LISA has released an arsenal of open standards (TBX, TMX, GMX, TMS, xml:tm, SRX) designed to serve as a base for the new breed of open architecture to come.
We’re all waiting to see what the new portability of content will bring with localization software as the enabler rather than the barrier.