Crowdsourcing and free Spanish translationThese days, more and more businesses and organizations are taking advantage of the phenomenon of crowdsourcing and using the masses for translation work. So what exactly is crowdsourcing? Crowdsourcing is a term that was originally coined by Jeff Howe in an article he wrote about in Wired magazine in 2006. The term itself refers to the act of outsourcing a task to the public. The public can take the form of individuals or groups of individuals, but the actual outsourced activity is initiated by the client, as opposed to open source where the public initiates the activities. There have been a ton of instances in the past of projects that have been outsourced, everything ranging from programming tasks to Wikipedia itself. What's interesting from our perspective as translators, however, is that organizations have begun to take advantage of the language ability of their users. Wikipedia and Google are some examples off the top of my head that have taken advantage of this. I recently came across an article the other day, though, that talked about crowdsourcing and using that to produce a Spanish version of Facebook. What is interesting is that there was no compensation on the part of Facebook to the translators and that the whole process -- from starting the translation to having it quality controlled by the same users -- only took four weeks. Obviously there are some pros and cons to this sort of approach, but for a social networking site like Facebook that has very loyal followers and users, it can be a great way to make people feel like part of the organization without having to compensate them monetarily. I suspect more and more organizations trying to reach the masses will use crowdsourcing to create localized versions and to add free Spanish translations (as well as other languages) to their portfolios.
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