Crowdsourcing: Is it a myth or a reality?

By Erkan Dogan, Chicago Translator

A short while ago, I participated in a powwow that was organized by Claudia Alvis from Hispanic Languages. We discussed the crowdsourcing and exchanged some ideas in the light of her presentation. It was a very useful presentation and the meeting itself was very inspiring in terms of brainstorming and identifying the potential consequences and complications of the issue. Well, it gave me a little more than that and triggered my delayed decision to write about it.

One of the recent phenomena in the Translation & Consultation Industry is crowdsourcing. Within the industry, it thrills a group of people while frightening some others to death! One thing is for sure: it opens the eyes of a great number of customers as they drool about the possibility of lowering their translation costs and still have their sophisticated translation projects be managed by competitive translators. Sounds like a terrific idea, right? Wrong! Along those great hopeful prospects come a great number of hiccups, because crowdsourcing is not really that easy to swallow, and you must have a very, very tough stomach to digest it.

The “famous” Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as “… a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group (crowd) of people or community in the form of an open call”. It even provides an illustration; “…, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm, or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data”. Wow! Sounds very promising in theory, but what about in practice, especially in translation?

In the beginning, crowdsourcing sounds like a result of collective efforts, like a primitive form-, or in other words - the baby steps of reaching Total Quality. Have a task, offer it to the community, collect the ideas in tremendous numbers, and let the task fulfill itself. As an Industrial Engineer, as well as someone having a lengthy military career with enormous numbers of continuous development and Total Quality applications, it intrigued me from the very first moment. “Collective Efforts!” That’s the word I’ve always sought after... for example, have you ever heard that Toyota had collected nearly 1.5 Million ideas when re-designing and manufacturing "Corolla" 7th Generation? Without a doubt, I believe it, - even if it were just a rumor - since that specific model is a real phenomenon that proved itself over many other brands and for nearly two decades. But is it possible to see crowdsourcing as a new “Corolla” that’ll change the rules of the translation “game”? Let’s take a look…

What does crowdsourcing mean in our terms as professionals within the Translation Industry? This is the question I am seeking an answer for. The idea of "collective efforts" could be best linked to Google probably, which inspired the idea of crowdsourcing. Google has been trying to improve Google Translate since its start in 2003. I don’t think that there is a single translator on earth that has not used, or tried Google Translate. Well, if you use it and do no like what you get as translated, you always have the option to “propose” your variant. It is up to you whether you contribute or not. So, in many regards, Google Translate has been the crowdsourcing model, if not the ideal one. Its statistical machine translation algorithm worked well to some extent for certain languages while creating some serious issues for some others. I am sure that its ability to provide an alternative will improve within time due to Google's ability to reach out to millions of people around the globe, but I highly doubt that it can replace a human translator soon, even a human translator of bad quality!

After being inspired, but not completely satisfied by Google Translate, some other entities, companies, or agencies moved forward to create their own “Google Translate” in a much more narrow scope. With a difference though: they charge REAL clients! What we see online today is the idea of your project being translated by “human translators” and “within hours”. Well, if it was so easy, how did I miss the idea myself for so longggg??!!... I have tried some of them myself, especially on two crowdsourcing sites, and what I will tell you about my experience might not sound very exciting. So, I made my application at two websites that offer "real human translations", "within hours", and for extremely reasonable prices "as low as ...". Here is what happened:

• During my application on one of them, my ability to translate, my experience, and my credentials were not questioned, because I was truly assumed to be a part of the “crowd”. Great, isn’t it? What did they do then? Just confirmed my ID through a test payment via credit card. That easy. So, anyone who want to be a translator can use a credit card and become one! I had been a “professional translator” up until that moment, but just became a "human translator" after my application was approved :). Great!

• The other site did not even hassle me with credit card verification, let alone my translation experience or credentials! I just had to enter my information and provide a PayPal account, and I was up and ready to go within minutes.

Then came the moment of truth. I received an email telling me that there was a project matching my language pair and was provided with a link. Thank goodness, it was a short one, about 200 words. When I agreed to undertake the project, I was given two windows, one with the original text on top and target text box at the bottom. So far so good, I could handle that and provide the client with a good translation. As soon as I noticed that there was a clock ticking at the bottom, reminding me that I had 15-20 mins or so, I was FULLY awake to complete the translation :) Thus, neither did the client know who his/her translator was, nor did I know who I was working for. That was the true moment when I realized that I had completely become a "machine translator" in the absence of a real interaction. No one asked me who I was, how many years of translation experience I had, or whether I had any credentials etc. Now, my personal definition for machine translators has evolved. The sources where you can paste your text and click "translate" are "software translators". However, the sources where you can crowdsource your project are “machine translators” with some “advanced” features such as charging you for the service. I truly believe that such a definition would be realistic.

Do crowdsourcing websites promise you to provide translations in all fields of expertise? Yes, they do, including some business translations, guidelines, technical manuals, website and software translations, and many more... They even do localizations! As I said in the beginning, it is ideal for you in case your business can rely on translations completed by anonymous but “human” translators. It is very much acceptable, IF you do not need any quality assurance for your business and legal content, binding agreements, website localization, and any other business related documents.

I still prefer a real translator thousand times more than crowdsourcing. If your concern is the cost, you can still bargain about your price with a REAL person. Yes, it is true that the more you bargain, the more likely that you will compromise the quality of your project. However, even in that case, you would always have the luxury to deal with a REAL person (not an anonymous human). You can go back to him/her to request some modifications, and ask your cultural questions if you need to know anything specific. If the subject is the localization of your website for example, I can only imagine the disaster that you would be facing once your project is completed. For example, sometimes there are certain terms that I go back for and change maybe 3-4 times, because I figure out more from the context as I continue to translate. Even after that, you would be surprised how many errors I find in my own “high quality” work after letting it sit for a day or two and see the translation on paper! I can only imagine the quality and mistakes of crowdsourced translations.

I recently received a call from a prospective client asking about an agency. She thought that the agency I was working with was crowdsourcing. Her major concern was lowering the cost at these “hard times”. Blaming the bad economy is becoming another good excuse these days other than "we don't have a budget for it" :))). First, I told her that the agency she was considering to work with was not crowdsourcing. If they did, she would have never been able to contact me :) Second, I told her about crowdsourcing a little bit and how it worked. I don't think she knew much about it given her reaction and questions. She seemed petrified and stunned on the other side of the phone! I don't think that "bad economy" mattered for her at that moment.

Wake up people! Back to Wikipedia’s definition, it is “…outsourcing them [the projects] to a group (crowd) of people or community in the form of an open call.” Are we all missing something here? You are passing your project to a number of people YOU DO NOT KNOW, because it is an OPEN CALL, where anybody & everybody CAN participate, and you are HOPING to make money from it! I cannot scream it louder than this! If it doesn't give you chills, it does to me…

The reason I put some time aside and exhausted myself to write this article is because I AM VERY MUCH CONCERNED about the quality of my work. And I should be so, IF I want to stay afloat. Back to my question in the beginning; “is crowdsourcing a myth or a reality”? I think it is becoming a reality now, but it is a reality that will undermine the quality and standards that professionals, such as myself, take pride!

Happy New Year!