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.
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