Crowdsourcing Translation And Termwiki My Glossary Lowers The Bar

By Author: David Andrews
Total Articles: 197
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For many companies, crowdsourcing represents one of the great gambles of the modern age. The trials experienced by successful crowdsourcers like Wikipedia, as well as the high propensity to failure of other projects, prove that managing the crowd to achieve a desired outcome is not an easy task. Risks involved in crowdsourcing include complete failure in uptake; sabotage; humiliation, and low quality of results. Yet at the same time, crowdsourcing offers companies in competitive markets the opportunity to engage and build a community around their customers, gain feedback and new ideas, gain publicity, and achieve the result - whatever that may be - for much less expenditure than organizing it professionally. These potential gains are generally enough to convince companies to give crowdsourcing a try.

Crowdsourcing for localization, or translation, has been made famous by market leaders like Facebook and Second Life, both of which relied completely on crowdsourcing to localize their site and game respectively. Localization is ideally suited to crowdsourcing, for several reasons:

- Being users, the translators of ...
... your content may be better qualified to suggest translations for your niche product than paid translators, who may not be subject matter experts.

- Engaging customers in non-core markets is a fantastic way to build brand awareness among uncommitted users.

- Companies engaging in professional localization will be limited to a certain number of languages for budgetary reasons. Yet provided the structure is in place, crowdsourcing translations need no limitation in terms of languages, enabling you to reach out to more markets than previously possible.

Multiple gains can therefore be experienced by crowdsourcing translations. Yet considering the high failure rate of crowdsourcing projects, as well as the initial investment required to set up collaboration infrastructures, many companies ideally placed for the gains of crowdsourcing may be put off.

The bar to crowdsourcing has been lowered by TermWiki, the language collaboration site. With the My Glossary module, TermWiki delivers a platform for companies to interact with customers to create the base of all localization efforts: term glossaries. Once fully developed, multilingual, approved terminology lists can be utilized by translators over the world to produce high-quality and consistent documentation, while actually saving you money in localization costs.

Using My Glossary, companies and individuals can upload source terminology into personal glossaries, then invite selected customers to translate the terms into 100+ languages, for free. The site has been designed around collaboration, with each term, in each language, having a unique discussion forum, as well as a term rating system. This means that TermWiki not only supports the collaborative translation of terms, but also the crowd-driven selection of the highest quality terms.

All participation and glossary use in TermWiki is completely free, for both companies and participating customers. In addition, contributors may also be attracted by TermWiki's nearly constantly-running contributor competitions, for prizes like iPads, Samsung Galaxy Tabs, and Amazon vouchers.

Please visit http://www.termwiki.com/About_My_Glossary for more details.