Has anyone had any experience on this crowdsourced translation project?
In today's world of constant connectivity, we are bombarded with an
overload of messages, information, and content on our computers, mobile
phones, and various other devices.
The plethora of information, in many cases, is not relevant to us.
The most relevant content, on the other hand, is sometimes not
searchable, and therefore, it is difficult to access what we really want
to see.
Related:
- Crowdsourced Translation Service Gengo Raises $12M
- Let's Translate the World's Videos, Starting With This One
Take for example, when we type in a search for “best of French wine.”
We get thousands of relevant results, but in reality, the most
pertinent answer is often not at the forefront of our search for one
simple reason – language barriers. The results we see and the way we
search the web is limited by language parameters, so if it is not
written in our native language, it may not materialize on our search
results. And even if it did, we would not been able to understand it,
unless we were fluent in that language.
Subsequently, the article on French wines written by a local French
connoisseur that would have been the perfect find may remain
inaccessible. When we search on Google, the search engine automatically
detects our IP address and brings us to the local Google page, unless we
manually override the language settings. This is true of many other
sites as well. The results we get are only in the default language
selected. Content that is more relevant to our search is “hidden”
because it is written in a different language. In a perfect world, we
could get search results from anywhere from around the world, translated
to your native language.
A few companies crowdsource volunteer multilinguals from all over the
world to make content accessible through translation. These volunteers
help break the language barrier. Some do it because they are passionate
about a specific subject. Some do it because they are passionate about
translating. Many do it to help level the playing field and make
information accessible to all. We’ve seen this happen successfully with
Wikipedia, where its crowdsourced translation model continues to
flourish, with over 280 language editions made available through their
volunteers.
Source: here
