This Spring I took a very interesting course on Social Localization and Translation Crowdsourcing, taught by Professor Adam Wooten. In the course, I was able to learn about best practices in social localization, community translation, and translation crowdsourcing. I also gained insight on volunteer management and motivation; quality control; appropriate translation management technologies; and workflow combinations with machine translation and professional translation.
For our final project for the course, my partner and I prepared a Translation Crowdsourcing proposal for Tactical Technology Collective, a non-profit organization made up of technology experts and activists working together to help individuals and organizations better understand digital security and the politics of data.
I have been involved with data privacy and security since last semester when I started working at Dlinq, the Digital Learning laboratory at MIIS, and I knew that Tactical Tech was interested in partnering with organizations to translate its materials, in particular the report ‘Personal Data: Political Persuasion. Inside the Influence Industry. How it works’.
The report is a collection of research pieces, each of which highlights a specific digital political campaigning method that uses voters’ personal data. Each chapter features a description of the method, technique or tool as well as examples from around the world of how it was used in recent elections.
Our proposal was a crowdsourced translation project to make Tactical Tech’s report ‘Personal Data: Political Persuasion. Inside the Influence Industry. How it works’ accessible to a global audience by using volunteer translators to carry out the mission of raising awareness about the impact of technology on society. By expanding its contents to a broader audience, we would be working towards a safer and more transparent digital environment and democracy, and by doing so through a community of translators interested in the matter, we would be ensuring at the same time both quality, efficiency and cost reduction.
If you want to know more details on ensuring both quantity and quality in translation crowdsourcing, check my previous blog post.
You can find more information on our translation crowdsourcing proposal for Tactical Tech below:
Translation Crowdsourcing Proposal + Supporting Material
