Professional Translator vs Crowdsourcing: What’s the difference and why should I care?

Jun 13
08:04

2011

Charlene Lacandazo

Charlene Lacandazo

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Crowdsourcing has become a hot buzzword, including the idea of crowdsourcing translation services. How viable an alternative is it to using professional translators?

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In today’s translation world,Professional Translator vs Crowdsourcing: What’s the difference and why should I care? Articles crowdsourcing has become a hot topic that a lot of professional translators and big corporations wants to talk about. However, translators seem to be annoyed and not interested in crowdsourcing translation services. So, what is crowdsourced translation anyway? Why are many translators against it? How true is it that crowdsourcing is better than professional translation? In addition, what are the advantages of crowdsourcing?‘’Crowdsourced translation’’, ‘’social translation’’, ‘’community translation’’, collaborative translation’’ or ‘’hive translation’’, these are all essentially synonyms, and actually refer to the same idea; it is a translation process, wherein the subject is open to multiple people for simultaneous or cooperative contributions to a translation. Recently, there have been several online-based companies using the crowdsourcing translation model for their website contents. Facebook, and Hi5 is one of the examples of the internet companies that are utilizing the crowdsourcing techniques for translation. These corporations believe that through crowdsourced translation services, things will go more quickly and thus, there will be more projects that the company may implement and make the materials of the company more accurate to their millions of users. On the other hand, if things are not properly organized and managed, it will take time for the administrator of the website or the corporation to fix the problem.There are many advantages of crowdsourcing translation. Aside from its being free of charge it makes the online company worry-free. It can avoids users to complain and question the translation or the lost meaning of the subject, for example, because the translation was carried out by users just like them. In this case, do you think crowdsourced translation is appropriate? Do you think it will provide a good quality of translation?Many professional translators are not in favor of the idea or method of crowdsourcing translation, because it takes more of their responsibility and their business away. Crowdsourcing may be an option to make the work easy, but the quality is questionable. There Is much ongoing criticism that Facebook and other online company are facing, because of misuse and wrong translation of terms and improper linguistic forms. However, as the world is modernizing, experts and scholars are drawing a picture of the future linguistic world, and in their view, there will be many high-tech gadgets and methods that will used in order to make the translation process easier. However, despite the fact that the crowdsourcing idea may be helpful, good quality translation will not still be available from machines or in collaborative translation. Thus, the touch of the human being or more specifically, the professional translator, is still needed.Business corporations and professional translation agencies exist to do business. However, doing business without security about quality, and without the assurance that you are hitting the taste of the people, means being wasteful. Hence, utilizing proper and accurate translation services is an important factor and helpful to a company