The impact of crowdsourcing and online collaboration in professional translation

Abstract

The emergence of crowdsourcing has opened up novel ways to initiate, produce and deliver translations in our digitally connected world. New practices and processes brought up by these phenomena have undeniably impacted different collectives with an interest in translation, such as language service providers (LSPs), professionals, and Translation Studies (TS). It has also been argued that crowdsourcing can impact public perceptions of translation, rising ethical concerns, issues related to the visibility of translation, or whether everyone can potentially translate (McDonough-Dolmaya 2012). This paper analyzes its potential impact on the realm of professional translation, an issue raised several years ago by a European Union Commission publication (2012, 37–38). It critically analyzes whether the much-feared socioeconomic and socio-professional impact on working conditions of professionals is underway or not. It represents an attempt at charting the potential influence of crowdsourcing on the profession through a critical review of existing literature and industry publications.

Quo Vadis, Crowdsourcing and Online Collaborative Translation?

“…The evolution of online collaborative translation continues to date, with models exploring MT post-editing and "paid crowdsourcing" (García, 2015;Jiménez-Crespo, 2021;Jiménez-Crespo & Ramírez-Polo, 2021), the third stage in the evolution of collaborative translation practices. Paid crowdsourcing emerged around 2008 and it is based on the premise that participants collaborate online to produce a single translation but their compensation rates are below professional ones.…”

“…The focus was on the fact that participants were not remunerated for their work. Nowadays, crowdsourcing also appears in the "paid crowdsourcing models" (García, 2015;Jiménez-Crespo, 2021Sakamoto, 2018) and, therefore, the emphasis on voluntarism is not inclusive enough to encompass all existing practices. The most widely used categorization was proposed by O'Hagan (2011) and it is based on the locus of control of the initiative, that is, solicited vs. non-solicited models.…”

“…Case studies on different contexts and settings 5. Research methodologies In addition to these main topics, other areas of interest are the relation between translation quality and non-professional models, economic issues such as the impact of collaboration on the profession (Jiménez-Crespo, 2021) or the uberization of translation (Fırat, 2021), as well as the introduction of distributed and extended cognition paradigms.…”

Digitalization and Its Impact on Business

“…"open source code", which applies to software whose license respects criteria are precisely established by the Open Source Initiative, i.e. the possibilities of free redistribution, access to source code and creation of works (Johnson-Eilola 2002). This novelty upset the traditional business of large firms, such as IBM, as well as that of software publishers (Hars & Ou 2014).…”

“…The tens of thousands of bytes that can pass through optical fibers make it possible to monitor or order railway interlocking for dozens of kilometers in diameter, in a few milliseconds (Du et al 2020). Besides, various sectors are already impacted by the arrival of AI and promise to be largely reinvented in the coming years, in particular by the progress of research in key areas: machine learning, computer vision, robotics, automatic language processing, collaborative autonomous systems, crowdsourcing, game theory, Internet of things, and neuromorphic electronics (artificial imitation of neuro-biological networks) (Winfield et al 2019;Callister 2020;Chamola et al 2020;Jiménez-Crespo 2021). Moreover, quantum computing will allow us to achieve great breakthroughs in science using computers which will no longer be attached to the simple binary digits 0 and 1 (Gyongyosi & Imre 2019).…”