Emily Taylor's Portfolio

Translation Crowdsourcing: Recruiting and Managing Volunteer Linguists for Room to Read

Written on March 17, 2017 – 3:49 pm | by Emily Taylor

Loc&Key

Loc&Key is a student-drive translation and localization company based in Monterey, California, created for the Localization Practicum course of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). The five project managers and two honorary employees (our beloved CCO and CFO) of this small translation company have combined their diverse skill sets to work together on localization projects that will act as a capstone for our graduation education. Loc&Key has partnered with Room to Read to offer translation, subtitling, terminology management, style guide creation, and translation crowdsourcing consulting services.

Room to Read

Room to Read is a San Francisco based nonprofit organization that “seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in developing countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education.” They reached out to Loc&Key to have their Global Monitoring Report localized from English to Japanese. During our project kick-off meeting, Loc&Key also offered to subtitle the videos on Room to Read’s Youtube channel into Japanese and the other MIIS languages (Spanish, French, German, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Korean). The representatives we spoke to were excited to hear that we could offer this service without requiring the source videos, thanks to our use of the subtitling platform Amara.

Challenges

Finding Translators

While many localization practicum projects use MIIS students to translate, we had a problem: there weren’t enough MIIS Japanese translation students to handle the 9,000 word Global Monitoring Report. We had to look elsewhere for volunteers.

When I lived in Kumamoto, Japan, I had participated in an English to Japanese translation club called Enjoy Translation. I contacted the organizer, Shino, and told her about our project and about Room to Read. She was enthusiastic about the cause, and when she pitched the idea at the next club meeting, she recruited seven additional volunteer translators for us!

Managing Volunteers

Shino created a private Facebook group called Room to Share that would function as our translation management platform.

Through Room to Share, the volunteers downloaded and uploaded files, claimed sections of the translation, and posted and responded to terminology inquiries. Because the content we were translating was readily available on the Internet, we didn’t need to worry about confidentiality issues. This allowed us to use Facebook as a platform to accommodate our volunteers, many of whom are unfamiliar with translation technology.

Finding Reviewers

While our volunteers in Japan were working hard to translate the Global Monitoring Report, I focused on recruiting MIIS students as volunteers to edit the translation. I contacted the Japanese translation professor, Hideko Russell, and received permission to use 15 minutes of class time to pitch our project.

Using the above Powerpoint presentation (shown here as a GIF), I introduced Loc&Key and gave an overview of the work Room to Read does by showing this video, my favorite from their Youtube channel:

I concluded with examples of how we plan to reward our volunteers, such as recommendations on LinkedIn and shout outs on our website. Indeed, I had already written a post about Kaya, a second year student of Translation & Interpretation who had been helping me answer terminology questions from our volunteers in Japan.

The presentation was a huge success, as every student in the Japanese program is now on board and eager to help!

Making Progress

Currently, our volunteers in Japan have finished translation the Global Monitoring Report, and I have passed the baton to Mary and Shiori, Translation & Interpretation students here at MIIS who are also native speakers of Japanese. They have offered to devote part of their spring break to editing the translation, after which my team and I will be able to move onto importing the Japanese text into the InDesign file to create a localized Japanese version of the PDF.

Lessons Learned

My work with Shino, Kaya, and our other volunteers has shown me how time-intensive it can be to manage a group of translators, as I acted as an in-between to field daily questions, but also how smoothly the process can go with a platform that matches the volunteers’ habits (in this case, Facebook). Meanwhile, Loc&Key uses Asana as our project management tool, a tool most of us are unfamiliar with and thus have not used as effectively as we could be. Sometimes, simple truly is best!

Tags: Asana, crowdsourcing, Japanese, Loc&Key, practicum, Room to Read