In the past few years we have seen a shift in the way some organizations view their customers – with a growing emphasis on involving customers.  An emerging trend that capitalizes on this shift is crowdsourcing – relying on a largely volunteer force to solve business problems in a distributed manner. In areas such as community web applications, non-profit information centers and technical support, where a ready supply of willing volunteers is available, crowdsourcing has quickly become a viable method of solving business problems.

In localization circles there is much talk of leveraging crowdsourcing techniques to enable a global force of volunteers to translate, transcreate and peer-review.  Yet, there are significant challenges to meet in order to make this approach successful.

Effective crowdsourcing requires a passionate and motivated force of volunteers – if the crowd doesn’t put the work in, the project may grind to a halt. Additionally, if maintaining quality or accuracy is important, structures and processes need to be put in place.

These challenges are especially true of crowdsourcing when applied to localization since most of the crowd aren’t professional linguists. If you target professionals they will expect some form of recompense – as LinkedIn found out recently.

The challenges of crowdsourcing

On the surface, crowdsourcing seems like “free” translation but free translation comes with a price! Quality, maintenance of brand identity, meeting time to market deadlines and uncertainty of the ultimate costs must all be managed – as well as perceptions of management, the market and the crowd itself through the whole process.

Quality Control: When translations are performed by a volunteer community, it is difficult to control how users will translate the content. Community translations may be inconsistent in language, format or context.  Regional variations may not be taken account of (or may be) and you operate at the whim of the crowd itself. For example, a translator for a French site may be living in Canada and translating into French Canadian, while other translations are coming from people living in France, making the translations inconsistent.

Managing brand and identity: A crowd does not typically care about your brand (again with some notable exceptions where the crowd “owns” the brand). Brand protections falls into two categories; maintaining corporate brand (protecting trademarks and brand messaging) and enforcing brand-related standards (style, language). The latter is particularly important since the crowd will not necessarily care about the same social niceties (profanity, slurs, bias etc.) that your company cares about – and it is your responsibility to protect yourself from the vagaries of the crowd.

Keeping the crowd interested: If users are not interested in reading content in their native language, they will not be inclined to participate for free. Even volunteers need incentives to keep them motivated and you should be prepared to step in with professional help where the crowd cannot or will not meet the challenge.

Succesful crowdsourcing

To realize the benefits of crowdsourcing, care must be taken to put in place the tools, processes and techniques that ensure success. Despite the hype in the industry there are very few examples of successful crowdsourcing in localization – those success stories are succesful because they thought through the approach completely – and they had a use-case that supports crowdsourcing.

Here are key elements of a framework for crowdsourcing localization:

Creation of style guides (covering overall writing and translation guidelines as well as help with sensitivity and appropriateness) for volunteers supplemented with web-based or in-country training if required.

In-country review facilities to provide final review of content against the clients style-guides – even where crowd-based peer reviews are leveraged. This ensures that crowd-sourced content meets the language requirements both for content (accuracy and consistency) and for context (cultural acceptance).

A network of professional translators to kick-start or supplement the crowd. The enthusiastic crowd may not exist in all the countries you want to be – or they may need some encouragement.

A translation environment the crowd can use to perofrm their translations, assess quality (peer-review) and promote succesful translations along with the usability, functional and linguistic testing required for software systems and infrastructure.

Beyond this framework you need to be able to market to the crowd and give them a reason to contribute. That may be financial or it may be social – just don’t underestimate the effort involved in getting the crowd excited.

There are many aspects of how crowdsourcing techniques can be leveraged – this entry focused on social networking and volunteer crowds. Feel free to add your comments and experiences.