Crowdsourcing Picks Up Speed in Sweden and Beyond

Article Details

Global Watchtower

Common Sense Advisory Blogs

Posted by Anne-Marie Colliander Lind, Nataly Kelly on August 26, 2009 in the following blogs: Translation and Localization
Pages \| \|

Despite the fact that some people might claim that what Dan Brown writes is not exactly “literature,” the Swedish translation of Dan Brown's anticipated mega-seller, “The Lost Symbol,” will be produced quickly by using crowdsourcing.

According to Jonas Axelsson, a literary director at publishing house Albert Bonniers, the book will be cut into six parts and translators will have seven days to translate about 100 pages each. The reason for the unconventional move is the American publisher's unwillingness to relinquish the script before the English version goes on sale.

Why can’t the script follow a more traditional literary translation process and timeline? Publishers fear that Brown's book could show up on file-sharing networks before it is released in English on 15 September 2009. The Swedish edition is scheduled to be released on 21 October 2009.

Sweden isn’t the only place experiencing an increase in the growing phenomenon that we refer to as “CT3” – crowdsourced, community, and collaborative translation:

The Cucumis community provides free online translation services performed by humans. Community members rate each other’s translations, and high-scoring members get points in exchange for their work, eventually working up to “expert” status.

Comic book fans are increasingly joining forces to create communities of “scanlators,” people who scan and translate manga from one language into another.

Members of the Eco Team, a grassroots movement of 240 translators, collaboratively produce a community-based Chinese translation of each issue of the Economist.

And, this week, the Baltimore Sun reported that Facebook submitted a patent application for its community translation platform. As we’ve observed, companies like Facebook as well as Microsoft, Sun, and Plaxo have also developed robust community translation initiatives. DotSub is now using crowdsourcing for multilingual subtitling. Meanwhile, the possible crowdsourced translation project at LinkedIn awaits its fate.

As in the example of the Dan Brown book, Common Sense Advisory’s research shows that faster time-to-market is one of the primary motivations for moving away from the traditional translation process and toward crowdsourced translation. In a world where the demand for languages consistently outpaces the supply, and technology requires suppliers to adjust their offerings, we don’t think that community translation will go away anytime soon. On the contrary, we predict that CT3 will be an option considered for any large-scale, quick-turn translation project.

Categories