Most American schoolchildren are familiar with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, (Mark Twain, 1876) and, thanks to translators, many students around the world have also read Twain’s classic. In the book’s most famous scene, the protagonist Tom is assigned the task of whitewashing a fence. While his motivation is to avoid work rather than cost, he cleverly manipulates his friends and acquaintances into doing the work for him. Not only does he leverage effective “non-financial rewards,” but he even gets others to compensate him for the “privilege” of contributing to the effort. Could this be the first recorded instance of crowdsourcing?
If so, it is missing a key component of the overall process: quality control. Twain is silent on that subject, but the translation and localization industry need not be. In fact, the industry needs to challenge perceived “truths” about crowdsourcing. The controversial topic of localization crowdsourcing needs a good whitewash.
Fast-forward. How is crowdsourcing playing out in the language services space? As with the original story, there are plenty of people with sufficient language expertise to volunteer for translation work, especially when the “non-financial rewards” are attractive. There are certainly situations where this approach can be appropriate and effective. The oft-cited Facebook experience is a prime example. In the Facebook translation scenario the volunteers/users themselves may actually benefit in non-tangible ways by expanding the reach of the social networking site to ...
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