Crowdsourced Translation

Description

Excerpt from the report on Public Media 2.0:

"Projects such as dotSUB (http://dotsub.com) harness volunteer energy to translate public-minded content so that it can travel across national and linguistic boundaries. Documentary films, political speeches, and instructional videos have all been translated by users of this service. Project Lingua (http:// globalvoicesonline.org/lingua/) invites readers of the Global Voices site to translate its content. Translators are active in more than 15 languages, including Spanish, French, Serbian, Arabic, Farsi, and Chinese." (http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/public_media_2_0_dynamic_engaged_publics/)

Examples

"One of the best known examples of crowdsourced translation is Facebook. In 2008 it launched a “Translations” app which delivered lines of text to be translated into different languages by Facebook users. To ensure quality, other users then voted on which was the best phrase.

This approach was so successful that a Spanish version of Facebook took just weeks to implement, and by the end of 2008 Facebook sought to patent the app."

(source: Getting Results from Crowds)