Localization With Crowd And Professionals

Earlier we elaborated a bit on crowdsourcing as a method of quality control. But that’s not the only step the crowd can perform in localization. Here are a couple of thoughts around why you might want to go with another combination of professional and crowdsourced work:

Crowdsourced Translation And Professional Editing

Typical reasons to engage the crowd for  the translation part might be for example:

  • Target language doesn’t yet have an established terminology and you want to know what kind of terminology people actually use in their everyday life when using your product.
  • Your application has a large and active user base and you know they want to help you with your product.
  • You want to engage your users and have them develop the product with you.
With an active and large crowd you are able to produce large amounts of text in a short time. You might easily get several people  working on one language at the same time, continually improving each others texts and producing new translations.
You can also let the crowd agree on translations for new terms and concepts, so that you can be sure the application will speak the users’ language. This does not mean that a professional translator could not capture those terms, but  the professional translator might not represent the target group geographically or demographically, which might lead to something else than the desired tone.
Reasons for still giving editing to professional linguists in the same project might be:
  • You want to be as sure as possible that e.g. all grammatical and punctuation errors are gone.
  • You might have defined some style guidelines (maybe even a style guide) and want to check that the translations adhere to these.
  • Your crowd is not big enough or you don’t know it well enough yet, so that you would feel comfortable relying completely on the quality of their output.

How do I know if a combination of crowdsourced translation and professional editing fits my localization needs? First you should ask yourself if you want to crowdsource. That decision should be determined e.g. by your revenue model, user base and content type. If the answer is yes, then take a look at the above listed reasons for having professionals give a finishing touch. If one or more of them apply to you, adding that phase is worth considering.