History: How will massive online collaboration impact the world of translation

Massively collaborative sites like wikipedia, YouTube and SecondLife are revolutionizing the way in which content is produced and consumed world wide. They are part of a broader wave of open collaboration that includes things like open-source software, blogs, Creative Commons licensing and free culture. These fundamentally collaborative technologies and paradigms are bound to have a profound impact on the way that content is not only produced, but also translated.

Below is a list of questions that relate to this theme. Please contribute your own thoughts and questions.

• What processes and tools are needed to to translate content that is constantly being edited collaboratively by a large community of anonymous authors ?

• How might translators benefit from open wiki-like translation resources ?

• In a world where anyone can write and publish original content in their native language will we need to cover more language pairs and if so how might Machine Translation technology help?

• Could massively collaborative technologies save freelance translators from extinction by allowing them to bid on parts of large contracts without giving up their autonomy and by allowing them to share expertise within the context of a world-wide community of practice?

• Will we see the emergence of a new breed of amateur volunteer translators and will this result in a de-skilling of the translation profession?

• How can organizations best leverage the collaborative energy of the new breed of amateur translators?

• How do we ensure the quality of translations and translation resources in a seemingly chaotic collaborative environment?

• How can massively collaborative technologies help save minority languages from extinction?

• Can teachers of translation take advantage of such technologies to provide students with real-life translation experience early on in their training?