Translation and Ethics: Why I wouldn’t translate Twitter’s FIGS

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Why I wouldn’t translate Twitter’s FIGS

Crowdsourcing, machine translation, bottom feeding… we all know what these are: threats to professional translators. What we don’t know is just how serious these threats are and what, if any, impact they’ve already had on our industry. On October 8, Tech Crunch published a post called Twitter Needs you to Translate its FIGS . This post tells us about the difficulties Twitter is facing when trying to “expand to the global community” and it describes how other social networking tools like Yahoo Meme have tried to “fill the gap” by offering Twitter-like services in Spanish and Portuguese. Twitter, apparently, is in danger. But do not despair, Twitter plans to “roll out support for FIGS: French, Italian, German, and Spanish […] and while Twitter is going to be doing some of the translations in-house, they are mostly trying to crowdsource translations, which is a strategy that Facebook has used in the past.” Twitter, like Facebook, has found a way to save thousands of dollars on translation. Kudoz to Twitter!

Just for the record, I love Twitter and Facebook. Thanks to these two great social utility tools I was able to reconnect with long lost childhood friends, stay in touch with my relatives, and meet amazing new people. I fully support their efforts to expand to the global community, and as someone who is half-American and half-Argentinean, I know just how much my loved ones in Argentina benefit from having these services in Spanish. What I am uncomfortable with are the ethical implications of crowdsourcing, particularly with Twitter’s added new twist.

What is crowdsourcing?

Crowdousourcing is a system that social utility tools have been using lately to get their interfaces translated for free. It’s based on user-suggested translations. Volunteer users suggest a translation for a ...

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http://translationandethics.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-wouldnt-translate-twitters-figs.html

http://translationandethics.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-wouldnt-translate-twitters-figs.html