Crowdsourced translations: my advice to a Big News Brand

| 18-06-2009| Translation & Cross-Cultural Relations

Three months ago, I was approached by the deputy editor of a Big News Brand asking for advice and ideas on what to do with community and crowdsourced translations regarding their brand and product.

I thought it would make a good follow-up to yesterday’s post on LinkedIn infuriating professional translators.

Here are the replies I sent him by e-mail, with the identifying details edited out. He has requested anonymity for the moment as they’re still deciding what to do.

An important point to note is that they are already a huge brand with an extremely well established reputation for the quality of their writing and insight in English.

1. You have massive brand appeal. You know this already. You have enormous brand equity and a truly global appeal in the minds of your current readers. Both what is happening in Country X and being approached about a community translation project are sure signs of this. It’s wonderful that you have fans who are willing to do this, and the shift from reader to fan is an important one.
2. Translating your material is a huge opportunity – both for your business and for furthering your editorial values. In Country X, I would suggest that you haven’t just discovered a fan site but a market or more precisely a series of them, one for each language.
3. Time is important. It seems you’re at something of a crossroads (who isn’t?) and you need to deal with readers’ perspectives, technology, translation quality, machine translation, Freemium, community projects, profitable business models and the precipitously-announced disappearance of the media as we know it. To a certain extent you’ve let the cat out of the bag in Country X by tacitly approving the initiative. Others (as you are seeing) won’t be far behind so you need to make a stand somehow and define your brand position towards the translation of your content.
4. You are not Facebook. You’re not talking about translating a user interface. In your case, the quality of your copy is your product, or at the very least a very large part of it. People read your publication, they don’t watch or surf it. I would suggest that ‘community translation’ as the idea is currently being discussed on the internet – and especially in your case as regards quality control – is not suitable for protecting or increasing your current brand equity.
5. Money is important but quality is more important. Many things still perplex me about the translation business but an especially interesting question is: why do so many businessman spend so much money developing and marketing products and then try to get the translations done by their cousins’ daughters who spent three months in London as students or pay a translator 0,00067€ / word? And this is just when they’re marketing another product, not when the texts they produce are the product.
6. Translation quality is a process. Translating your entire publication cannot be done by one professional translator every month and nor should it be, and neither should it be outsourced entirely to enthusiastic fans. You need a structure which perhaps relies on fans who are dedicated to quality for some reason (payment of some kind, or maybe membership of an exclusive translators-only club) but which also has in-house quality control. You need some kind of control over the texts which appear in your name. Translation certified by your company would not only defend your current brand position but enhance it.
7. A professional translation is more important than a professional translator. Professional is an attitude to quality which can be shared by full-time and part-time translators alike, regardless of whether or not they call or consider themselves professional translators. It can also be absent in the latter.
8. You already have a tribe. You must protect what your tribe believes in (quality, insight, global viewpoint, etc…) and try and increase the size of your moat and the thickness of your walls, as Buffet says. Your tribe currently needs to speak English as a prerequisite for joining. But your tribe need not be, should not be, restricted by any language. At the same time, perhaps you need to be more specific about which fans you need to help you out: maybe the fans you need are really professional translators who also read your publication. Give them a free subscription, early access to next week’s edition and perhaps a badge they can stick on their blog saying they’re a ‘Your Publication Certified Translator’. You should also pay them for their work, of course.

Note: regarding shiny badges as part of the idea and this week’s LinkedIn translation crowdsourcing controversy, the shiny badge suggestion was a tiny part of this idea – not the whole idea – and the publication in question already has several decades worth of reputation for the quality of their insight and their writing. As a translator, a badge (and payment of course) from these guys would be worth having.