Surviving crowdsourcing

Community, collaborative, social: will the language industry survive crowdsourcing? Luigi Muzii

Thinking
We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Reminds you of anything?

The approach to crises
Conservative
Typical of the language services industry
Any change is a major change
Cut cost and reduce staff
Do more with less
Innovative
In products
Translation is a cost
VAS
In processes
Standards and interchange to build productive solutions
Specialized communities
Made simpler, lean, and parallel

GILT industry mantra
Cheaper, Faster, Better
Doing more with less costs more
Technology to increase volume and speed
Not enough good people in translation
Poor or no quality increase
Customer satisfaction decrease

Translation industry axioms
Quality
Fewer translators produce more consistent output
Assets
Are TM’s and glossaries assets? Have they ever been? Will they?
Assets carry some value
How can TM’s and glossaries be priced? Are they?

Main concerns
LSP’s
Ongoing commoditization
More free translation
ATA’s*
Global outsourcing
Crowdsourcing
Economic downturn
Certification by other entities
Machine translation
Increased competition for revenue streams
International expansion
Licensure
* ATA Board’s globalization threats reported in the ATA Chronicle issue of June, 2009 by President Jiri Stejskal

Vendor management
The largest cost budget item
Hundreds or thousands of vendors
Technology & staff
Vendor quality assessment
Several vendor manager
Rotation for healthy relationships

Crowdsourcing
The act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.
Jeff Howe
The Rise of Crowdsourcing, June 2006

Crowdsourcing in a nutshell
The (latent) wisdom of (online) crowds
Only the best professionals are supposed to answer call and team up
A passionate and motivated force of volunteers is needed
The work is not supposed to be done for free

The crowdsourcing process in eight steps Image by Daren C. Brabham

Reasons for crowdsourcing
To reach totally new markets
To better serve markets that are currently under-served
To increase the value of global brands by further engaging users

Famous crowdsourcers

Typical practice Customer MLV SLV 1 Language 1, region 1 TSP n Language n , region n SLV n Language n , region n TSP 1 Language n , region n TSP n Language 1, region 1 TSP 1 Language 1, region 1

Community, crowdsourced, and collaborative translation (CT3)
CT3 projects typically done on purpose-built software
Developing those systems is expensive
Effort could not be worth the investment
Community (social) translation not the same as crowdsourced translation
Non-profit translations
Made for the benefit of everyone

The problem with translators
Building a software infrastructure vs. paying translators
The translators’ skills are not worth spending
Amateurs collaborate to avoid “weird” translations

Crowdsourced translation
Multiple people in a collaborative workspace
Writing
Supply content to be translated
Terminology
Provide a terminology list up front
Translation
Stay involved in community interaction
Communicate everything upwards
Monitor progress
Review/Editing
Leverage group voting mechanisms for accuracy
Recognize and reward achievement

The end of TEP & fordism
Reduce, reuse, recycle
Reduce overhead
Eliminate duplicate and unproductive work
Reuse terminology and translation
Centralized TM’s and dictionaries
Recycle TM matches
Machine translation
Time adds up
Micro chunks
Efficient workload
Negligible individual time
No need for reviewers
X-checks to deliver high-quality translations
No further “improvements”

Crowdsourcing vs. Machine Translation according to Mojofiti
Crowdsourcing
Advantages
Free, abundance of knowledgeable human translators, 100% accurate translations, demonstrates an openness to the public
Disadvantages
Security measures must be in place, content accuracy reviews (especially from a cultural perspective), no full-time “staff” to count on
Machine Translation
Advantages
Fast time to market, machine translation servers can be used for a variety of applications, flexibility to change content as often as you wish
Disadvantages
Generally very costly (based on the number of “language pairs” and sometimes overall use), machine translations often leave out cultural references, evolving industry – no machine translation service has been able to promise 100% accurate translations, yet.

The perfect translation team
Experts and fellow translators coordinated by a project manager for information transfer
Error prevention
Doing right the first time every time
Education and training play different roles in a translator’s profile
Dissociate domain-specific knowledge from language skills and productivity skills

Concurrent Translation

Community Review

Quality

Issues
Crowdsourcing initiatives can be dangerous when cost is volume based
Tools for creating and updating content
One-fits-all internationalization strategy
Trust and authoritativeness of translators
Searchability and accessibility of reference material
Bootstrapping and incentives to participation
Ownership of material
Compensation

Pays…

Money matters
Gresham's law
Bad money drives out good
If translators are paid low it is hard to get qualified people
LSP’s share the same pool of resources
Testing freelancers is expensive and not reliable
Better to just do small test project
Shorten production and industry chains

The rise of “ freeconomics ”
In a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost
In the translation industry, unit cost is close to zero and will continue to decline
Freemium
Some software and related services, some content
Free to users of basic versions
Cross-subsidy
Give away services to one customer while selling to another
Treat them as if they were free
Attention and reputation economy

What is your dangerous idea?
The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time.

Thank you
[email_address]
Skype: luigimuzii
Blog: http://ilbarbaro.splinder.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ilbarbaro

Surviving crowdsourcing

by Luigi Muzii

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