A NY Times article published yesterday covered the story of LinkedIn‘s plan to use crowdsourcing to translate their site to languages other than the already-available English, German, French and Spanish. According to the article, a survey was sent to thousands of professionals in the LinkedIn network to gauge their opinions about providing their services to translate the site.
Here’s a chart showing the responses to LinkedIn’s survey question regarding incentives:
“What type of incentive would you expect for translating the LinkedIn site?”
Source: http://linkedin.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/graph21.jpg?w=502&h=321
As a result, LinkedIn has received a flurry of feedback over the last two weeks, much of it coming from translators themselves voicing their opinions about professionals being compensated fairly. A Twitter hashtag was established (#linkedinfail) and a LinkedIn discussion group was formed (Translators against Crowdsourcing by Commercial Businesses), now with 300+ members.
Here’s a look at some of the comments that have been posted in the past two weeks:
If LinkedIn goes ahead with an open call for translations, they’ll likely attract both professional and amateur translators. The issue then is that a professional and an amateur participate for different reasons. The professional looks for financial compensation, while the amateur seeks out, for example, recognition within the community (ie. “You’re the #1 translator of [ language name] based on submitting [x number of translations]“).
That becomes interesting because one of those deals – the amateur – is a much better one for LinkedIn (provided they put in place a system to ensure some standard of quality in translation).
So, if you’re a translator – which side are you on? Is this an opportunity to contribute to a community and gain valuable experience? Or, as some have questioned, is this the exploitation of professionals?
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