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.