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The rebellion of collaborative translation

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Translation professionals it would seem, are rebelling, which is leading to some rather amusing albeit childish online pranks. Facebook is living proof of how these so called jokes can get out of hand and how damaging they can be. At the end of the day, it is down to the fact that they rely on unpaid volunteers to translate their web pages and little is done in terms of quality control.

Professional translation is not the problem here. Here’s an example of something that we can read in Turkish on one of the worlds largest social networking site: “Your message could not be sent because you have a small penis”. An innocent joke maybe, but you can imagine how this sort of thing can spiral out of control with 150 000 words being translated into 52 languages using this very method of collaborative translation. This is what the LinkedIn executives should be thinking about, seeing as they are considering going down the same route.

You can understand why such a method might be appealing mostly due to the lack of cost involved. For the moment the process involves asking Internet users to translate pages of a web site for free, an ever-growing way of getting around actually having to pay a translation professional. Naturally, translation agencies and freelance translators are slightly worried about the arrival of this collaborative translation, which allows companies to obtain the translation of any document the so desire, for free.

It is possible that the childish jokes we mentioned before have indeed stemmed from translation professionals who fear that their career is being threatened by the very idea of collaborative translation.
If we wanted to calculate the cost of translating facebook into 52 different languages, for example, by a translation professional, this would easily come to 1 million Euros. With an estimated worth of more than 20 billion dollars, isn’t it time to mix a bit of professionalism into the machine?