Thursday 23 June 2016

Translation Crowdsourcing is Good for Business

Crowdsourcing is Good for Business

Many articles have been studied about crowdsourcing for translation companies and there are a number of reasons why crowdsourcing takes place.  Most benefits are due to factors that can be found in all types of translation work. 

The cost of translation is important to translation companies but it does not always figure as the most important reason for crowd sourcing. It is hard to understand why this is the case especially when companies like Facebook has got its site  translated into 70 languages using no less than 100,000 words in each. With a price tag of around 10 cents a word this could attract a bill of around $US 7 million. 

Adam Wooten from Globalization Group Inc. states that crowd sourcing costs maybe more than more traditional professional German translations. Perhaps the reason that saving costs are not seen as important is the difficulty persuading users to do translations for free just to increase company profits. It is not surprising that professional translators sometimes do not favour translation crowdsourcing for for-profit companies.

The speed of translation speed is usually regarded as the key reason for crowdsourcing for translation. A good example is the translation of Face book into French. When 4,000 users of Facebook translated the complete site into French in a 24 hour period it could most likely have won the prize for the quickest translation ever. That speed of translation would be just about impossible to achieve with translation organised in a traditional way.  When Facebook overtook MySpace it occurred because of the international user base.

Translation crowdsourcing means a single user base can translate into many languages with a minimum of organisation.

Some people think that the user base produce far better quality English German translation than traditional translators as they have a better understanding of the subject. It is quite safe to assume that crowdsourcing quality is more than adequate. 

Facebook says 300,000 users have completed translations and with more than 500,000,000 users that is 6 in about 10,000 users. 

In summary speed is of the greatest importance to translation crowdsourcing and quality seems to be good too if Facebook and Twitter are used as examples. About quality there are differing views but we can say for certain that at least Facebook and Twitter have achieved good quality translations to draw their supporters.

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