Crowdsourcing has been all the rage in whatever topic we can think of. From rides (Uber) to hotel industry (Airbnb), to babysitters or designers. Any service you can imagine as a possible subject to crowdsourcing methods has been indeed a subject to it. Of course, some of them have been a public success, while others not so much.
Crowdsourcing translation
Plenty of companies have turn towards this method as they say that they can get native speakers in a much easier way, than if they were to contract professional specialized translators to do those jobs. So the whole translation process gets crowdsourced.
This means that like in “Personal translation” more than one person will work at the same project, but the biggest difference is that when crowdsourcing those people cannot communicate between them. They will do their job in the darkness, and it will go without two very important tools we have developed in the last decades:
- An adequate glossary to guide on the topic which will guide them and help them to meet the requirements of the client.
- An effective Q and A tool that helps them to review their work before sending it.
So something that sounds modern and edgy it is ironically lacking tools of modern translation. So at the first stage of the translation we have a translator who has to meet an ever so tight deadline, and who is in the dark (no glossaries, no Q and A tool) and who has no means to effectively communicate their doubts, and get an answer before the translation is due. In “Personal translation”, as I call it here, these problems don’t exist because those tools as well as a fluent communication are the modern cornerstones of good translation practices. Now, you can ask yourself what crowdsourcing translation needs?