History: Business case

Is C-S only for non-profit organisations?

If you want translation done, your options are:

• Professional translation
  • Large expensive shops
  • Mom and pop shops
• Crowd-sourcing
• Machine Translation

Crowd-sourcing is sort of in between in terms of:

• Volume
• Cost
• Quality

Not clear that C-S will make a clear dent in the demand-offer gap.


In Wikipedia, contributions follow a power law with a relatively small number doing most of the contributions. But long tail still very relevant, cause these small changes and corrections amount to much.

Wikipedia versus translation C-S. WP contribution more coarse (can't parallelise at a sentence level). But translation can be parallelised that way.

Should C-S translation be parallelised at a document or sentence level?

Indirect crowdsourcing. Ex: Page Rank is based on links created by a very large crowd.

What are the killer apps for crowdsourced translation?


What does C-S give you:

• Facebook: time to market (translate your product in 1 day)
• User participation
• Outreach

Could C-S used as a way to decrease lead-time in a professional translators situation

• Ex: If ProZ deployed a platform for parallelizing large translation tasks to professional members of their network.

Will C-S dramatically affect livelyhood of professional translators?

• Will put downward pressures on cost for sure.
• But may create new oppportunities for new kinds of work (like Open Source did in Sofware Dev).
  • QQ
  • Coaching the crowd
  • Terminology management, creating resources to help the crowd
  • Coordination

What knds of tasks are not being done by profs now:

• Short lived, dynamic content
• Languages with small markets, but with motivated native crowd
• Companies with small international outreach
• Content produced by non-profit orgs

What kinds of content ARE being translated by C-S now:

• Fan translation: Content that you are personally attached to
• TedTalks: high profile content
• YOur favourit app (ex: Facebook)
• Customer support articles, manuals (Adobe) - Q: what motivates people to translate stuff there?
  • A: A crowd of third value developers, value-added developers, with special priviledged relationship with the commercial organization. In those scenarios, good MT is crucial, cause crowd probably less motivated to contribute.
• Organisations whose mission are inspiring (ex: Kiva)

What content will ALWAYS be translated by professionals:

• Material where cost of mistake is high
  • Safety issue (legal, medical)
• Creative material
  • Marketing
  • Literary

Maybe translators will become 100% revisors

• Revise crowdsourced translations
• Revise MT outputs