Platform requirements

These are notes from a breakout session at the AMTA 2010 Workshop on Collaborative Translation and Crowdsourcing, Denver, Colorado, October 31st 2010.

Session moderator: Willem Stoeller

This breakout session focused on a cluster of issues that pertain to the requirements and desirable characteristics of technological platforms for supporting collaborative and/or crowdsourced translation.

The following issues were raised for this cluster, during the brainstorming part of the workshop:
  • How to make sure that the platform is usable and globally accessible?
  • What are the tasks and goals that people will need to carry out in a collaborative/crowdsourced environment, and what are the mechanisms for supporting those?
  • Features for source control in User Generated Content.
  • Need for a stable, affordable, flexible platform.
  • What are the requirements for a "translators exchange" (i.e., a kind of e-bay of translation services)
  • Do we need new platforms or can we just adapt old ones?
  • As a customer, how do I choose the best solution for my needs?
  • Compatibility issues between different platforms.
  • Features for quality control
  • Understanding the relationship between Tasks, Applications and
Below is a summary of the discussion that took place around those issues.

What is a platform?
  • Marketplace where people who need translation and people who can provide translation meet and exchange jobs
  • Set of tools for text translation and text creation, focusing on crowdsourcing framework
  • Shared resources, such as terminologies and translation memories

How are translation communities formed?
  • Community already exists
  • Community needs to be recruited. Need a mechanism for organizing a crowd around a particular project.
  • Broad community exists, around open source development or common

What is the role of existing software platforms? What can they do well? How can they work together?

Basic requirement/goal is that it be cloud-based. However, some interesting work could be downloaded and processed locally, then shared on the cloud.

Virtually any translation environment tool (TEnT) could host a translation crowdsourcing tool.

There is a continuum of engagement and cost, from free and voluntary to paid and controlled.

What translation crowdsourcing options are available today? How do you choose one that works for your requirement?

Lingotek integrated with WorldServer for LDS Church to handle crowdsourcing requirement.

Open source examples include Transifex, Launchpad, Sun open tools for translation.

What are the fundamental requirements of a translation crowdsourcing platform?

The requirement of a platform is that it be able to some set of applications; the requirement of an application is that it be able to support some set of tasks.

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