Changing the World With Open Translation
While there are some pretty nifty machine-based language tools out there, no machine will ever trump human translation. Machine-based tools are fine for simple greetings and pleasantries. However, only human translators can help us understand the political and cultural nuances inherent in foreign texts. This is important on two accounts. Firstly, rather than bouncing ideas off a culturally insular echo-chamber, we have a chance to learn from others with distinctly different view points. And secondly, for the first time ever, world history moves from being a confined regional fact to an evolving and diverse discussion.
Human translation lets us address collective global issues while also seeing the negative and positive impact of our choices. For this reason a number of groups have come forward to produce open translation (or crowd sourced translation) projects. Here are just a few of those efforts:
1. Project Lingua: This service aims to reduce language barriers on the web. With Project Lingua, volunteers translate alternative media sources from citizen journalists on the Global Voices network.
2. Worldwide Lexicon: This project first parses information with machine translators and real humans review the translations to ensure they are accurate. From here, the group republishes the sites in a number of languages in order to encourage cross-cultural dialogue. The group also built Der Mundo - what WWL describes as a "general purpose translation community for blog and RSS feeds."
3. WikiProject Echo: WikiProject Echo is a program where volunteer translators contribute their efforts to expanding the scope of Wikipedia. Volunteers will certainly have their hands full translating this amount of data as the site advertises 2.9 million English articles alone.
4. TED Open Translation Project: For polyglots, the TED Open Translation Project is a great way to practice superior language skills while contributing to a cause-worthy project. We're big fans of this educational series. All translators and reviewers are credited on the web page for a talk they've translated as with the above Arabic translation.
5. Cucumis: Cucumis also employs volunteer translators and all translation is thoroughly peer-reviewed. Once a translator's work is accepted, they receive points. The points are redeemable for translations from others within the community.
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Google is the firstcomer here. They let you suggest a change in their translations. So you feed their machine translation engine with human translation, and it gets better and better (of course depending on the quality of their machine learning and feedback normalization technologies).
Facebook is successfully running its crowd-sourcing Translations application for the 64 languages it currently supports. Using this upp, third party developers can also have their applications translated by the community.
Dana: Great article. I think you are definitely on to something. However I think that it is interesting to note that many of these 1st generation hybrid translation approaches are simply attempts to "bolt-on" automated (machine) translation technology to traditional human-review and editing workflows. I believe the future will actually be inverted from this model, where human review and editing is really a natural extension of the automated translation model, not the reverse.
It's also interesting to note that most, if not all, of these companies listed support a volunteer-based model. While some of these companies, in addition to others such as Facebook, have had early success with this, I suspect this approach is not sustainable. As the novelty of translating for free fades for all but a few niche companies and domains that folks are passionate about, translators (professional and non-professional) will expect fair compensation.
A very interesting company called NativeTung.com will launch this September (2009). They are determined to shake up the language translation industry. Will be interesting to watch these guys.
-Idris
Thanks for the article. I think that Google Translate is also a good one.
Crowdsourcing translations leads to imperfect results, but it's way better than machine translation, and it's a very good start to do some more serious/traditional translating and editing work.
As an example, I've started with a wiki crowdsourced translation of Lawrence Lessig's 'Free Culture'.
http://www.wikilivres.info/wiki/index.php/Culture_Libre
With something like 3-4 days of editing, finished with an almost perfect french edition of the book :
http://fr.readwriteweb.com/2009/02/05/a-la-une/culture-libre-free-culture-lawrence-lessig-ebook/
And Voilà, major ideas gone cross border (we french do not speak a lot of english). This would have been impossible without what has already been done by a dedicated community on the wikilivre.info website.
So yes, crowdsourcing is definitely the way to go.
In Europe, we also have Cafebabel.com, a news website focused on Euporean issues, translated in 8 languages through a partly crowdsourced translator network. They are doing some amazing things. Should write about that sooner or later.
Wow Fabrice! Thank you.
Dana, great article.
I believe that Google translator toolkit is going to make a small revolution in the human translation industry. It should have been mentioned in your article.
Translation of informal is documents is going to change dramatically and it's rates are going to be very very low.
However, translation of professional business documents will still need the dedicated work of a talented human translator. We provide such services for the lowest cost available at www.Tomedes.com
A couple of Euro-projects to mention here. Both translate representative selections of the European press into multiple languages (including English!), daily.
EuroTopics, the original, translates into 5 languages. Funded by the German government. Extremely readable.
Presseurop.eu, launched a month or so ago and even more ambitious, with 10 languages. Funded by the European Commission, but the content is non-specialist by definition. The journalists and translators are basically motivated by idealism (disclaimer: I work with them, so I've seen this up close).
Both projects are chasing the elusive dream of a European public space, where people can understand each other while keeping their own language. Have a read.
I agree with what Idris has pointed out:
"... this approach is not sustainable. As the novelty of translating for free fades for all but a few niche companies and domains that folks are passionate about, translators (professional and non-professional) will expect fair compensation."
How NativeTung will "shake up the language translation industry" remains to be seen. The link below offers a hint that it might be just another big outsourcer making money as a middleman off those whom they persuade to work for next to nothing ... http://www.consumercomplaints.in/complaints/nativetung-bangalore-c171197.html
This is brilliant topic!I think that conversation must happen around
content. This way, there is context and meaning. Life streaming is at
odds with this for sure...