CT3: Twitter Goes Multilingual
Twitter announced last week that it would be using CT3 (community, crowdsourced and collaborative translation) to make its content available in the FIGS (French, Italian, German and Spanish) group of languages. They’re stepping on ground that brought some trouble to LinkedIn some time ago. Despite specific website approaches, the CT3 matter will be sure to generate a lot of debate in the times to come. So it would be nice to start understanding the factors that surround it.
The first factor is resistance. Professional translators may feel their market is at risk. To be honest, as a web developer, I felt the same in the past, when potential clients started considering the option of having their nephews, who “knew a bit of HTML”, build their corporate sites. So they probably question how people, who are not even professionals in the language area, can do their work for free, especially for-profit corporations. On the other hand, this kind of initiative can even bring more work for language professionals, as it can create opportunities for proofreading content which didn’t exist before.
On the CT3 defense side, it’s said that costs are not the motivation of crowdsourcing. CT3 is desired because it’s faster, better, wider and democratic. The article about LinkedIn I mention above goes deeper into this discussion, but I’ll try to summarize it below.
It’s faster: whoever has worked with contracting services for a specific business knows how long and painful the process can be. Vendor selection, contract process, prototype design, implementation and tests can take months. CT3 can bring results in a fraction of this time, as you can check out in this article about the Facebook experience.
It’s better: subject-matter experts, the given website end users and regional language speakers can bring the quality of the content to its best, aside from the use of specific regionalisms.
It’s wider: when people get involved, they tend to increase the word of mouth effect, which is particularly good from a marketing standpoint.
It’s democratic: In some cases, the website users can vote if a given translation is proper to that case. That’s even more interesting than the traditional single writer/editor model.
Studies show that the social networking traffic has begun to stabilize in North America, but rapid growth can be seen in other parts of the globe (35 percent in Europe, 66 percent in the Middle East-Africa region, 33 percent in South America and 23 percent in Asia). In a June 2007-2008 comparison, Facebook traffic in Latin America grew 1055 percent (from 1 million to 12 million unique visitors/month). It only shows the potential reach a website can gain from having its content translated into multiple languages.
From different standpoints, CT3 can be good or bad, but it seems to have worked well for some enterprises. The most important thing to take into consideration, though, is how to conduct this effort along with the community, because that seems to be the most delicate point of the discussion.
Last 5 posts by William Bertolo
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When the Localization Industry Standards Association interviewed and surveyed more than 100 managers and directors at high-tech companies about how they’re approaching crowdsourcing within their globalization function, we found some surprises. For example, the main reason for leveraging crowdsourcing is not cost-savings, but to reach the “long tail of languages.” As Symantec put it, “The ‘long tail languages’ may not individually have a big impact, but together, they can rival the major languages. Companies like Dell are also looking to their language services providers to eventually manage their crowdsourcing efforts. More details are available at http://www.lisa.org/Crowdsourcing.1280.0.html.
In short, more people can enjoy the fruits of technology since it is now available in different languages.
This is a markedly different approach than what they’ve employed in Japan, where they’ve allowed a local partner to essentially incubate the business for the Japanese market.
It will be interesting to see how this mixed bag of crowdsourced translation and pure localization works as Twitter localizes their global footprint.