It wasn't just me, you see. I was initially annoyed enough to want to tweet about it and leave it at that. But when I went to do so, I found that a few others had already beaten me to it and they weren't a happy bunch.

Over the next few hours, Twitter lit up with dozens of professional translators tweeting about this, all of them unhappy on a scale ranging from mild annoyance to outraged enough to close their LinkedIn account. From this group of people, that reaction is remarkable.

Then came the suggestion for the LinkedIn group which now has 270 members, several threads and dozens of well-written comments on the subject, which I'm sure everyone has benefited from reading and participating in, whatever point of view they hold personally.

The idea with the original blog post was to summarise all of that activity and tell the story a little. It certainly seemed to strike a chord with many people. If my posts have served to further the discussion more, that's even better.

Do you mean that freelancers are perhaps upset at losing out on piece of the LinkedIn translation budget pie?

If so, after reading all the discussion this week, I wouldn't say that's the case; most people participating seem to have more than enough paid work to be getting on with.

I don't know if you've read all of the discussion on LinkedIn but if you haven't I'd encourage you to take some time to do so, as there's been a lot of great informed debate about the different options too.

It was directed at professionals by a web site for professionals, and yet the list of things one might want in exchange for one's professional services didn't include money.

If that had been an option, I'd have been fine with the whole thing. To relegate professional compensation for professional work to the category of “Other” — usually reserved for bizarre or even unreasonable requests — does show a singular lack of respect for the very concept of professionalism.

Would you not be annoyed if someone approached you as a professional beta tester and asked if you would beta test their site for free? Sure, they offered to give us a badge for our LinkedIn profiles, but the value of that badge is virtually zero if they give it to anyone and everyone who helped out in the translation crowdsourcing project. Perhaps if they had approached me personally, knowing the quality of my work, and offered to give me special recognition for helping out a bit, I might have actually considered it.

Then since the whole debate erupted on Twitter, LinkedIn's reaction has been far from satisfactory. But I won't go into the details of that right now.

I also wanted to say that I received a similar sort of request from Plaxo a while back, but their message was sent out to all users in a given country asking if we'd like to help them translate their site into the language of that country (in my case Italy and Italian). This didn't bother me in slightest because they were targeting all users/fans of their service here, and if Italian were my native language, I may have even considered lending a hand — even being a professional translator — simply because I like(d) their service.

So it's all in the context of what LinkedIn did and how they went about it, not the mere fact that they were thinking of crowdsourcing the translation of their site.

“…would you also be happy to do some of their accounting because you know how to count?” – but knowing how to count wouldn't qualify me to do accounting work. As I made clear in my comment, writing reviews, editing articles, beta testing websites (and, though I didn't mention it), translating advertising campaigns and user interfaces – these are all aspects of my job. They're things I do 'professionally', by definition.

And I don't feel offended, belittled or slighted when a website asks me if I'd like to help out by doing some of that for free. If I don't want to help (maybe I'm sick of doing work stuff and would rather not do that kind of thing when I get home), then I just don't do it.

Perhaps if I was a freelancer, I'd have a better grip on just how much that free work was worth to me.

Of course everyone is quite within their rights to respond how they see fit, as is LinkedIn or any other company to ask any questions they like of their users and decide how they want to run their business based on the results.

And once again, the 'fury' this past week hasn't been about LinkedIn as a concept or a site, just the way they have presented and handled this particular project, which most of the professional translators who have participated in the debate believe shows an enormous amount of disrespect towards them and their work from a networking site for professionals where 'relationships matter'.

Neither has anyone said, as far as I can recall, that they have any problem with beta testing; in fact, we all clicked through to the survey in the first place because it was presented as a 'help us to improve our service' questionnaire.

It seems there have been a few people annoyed enough with LinkedIn as a company, though, to delete their profiles as a result.

As a comparison: would you also be happy to do some of their accounting because you know how to count?

A lot of us like to collaborate online. Part of my job is beta-testing and usability-testing websites to ensure they're working correctly when they launch. By your rationale, I ought to be up in arms when I beta-test a website for free. Me, a professional beta tester!

Another part of my job is writing reviews. And yet, I'm happy enough to help for-profit websites out by giving them free UGC in the form of reviews written by me. A professional reviewer!

With all due respect, I think it is these rather shrill complaints that have made websites like CSA refer to those complaining in a condescending manner. In short: if you don't want to help, don't help. If you do, do. But is this really worth making such a fuss about?

Oh, and you haven't mentioned it, but I guess you've cancelled your LinkedIn account. You still have a link to it in your sidebar. >>

This is dead on and I'm glad that you wrote a response to CSA's blogpost. The fact is that LinkedIn was not even close to asking for a carefully controlled CT3 project and I commend you for continued coverage on this important matter.

Gabriel Rodino
http://www.linguainc.com