You might already be familiar with the project management triangle, also known as the project triangle, which demonstrates an inevitable tension between its three dimensions; cost, time, and quality. It is a common belief that you can only get two out of the three, and the last one has to suffer.
As with many initiatives that rely on crowdsourcing, achieving consistency in crowdsourced translation is a real challenge. Although cost and speed are the true gainers, quality will always suffer. This should not discourage you from considering crowdsourcing as a valid solution for your translation project. With the right kind of processes and measures in place, you can ensure that the quality is just as good, or in some cases even better, than the quality you might receive from traditional translation workflows.
Ensuring Quality in Translation Crowdsourcing
Volunteer Vetting
Always vet your volunteers. This might add a little bit of extra time, but the gains are worthwhile. There are multiple ways to vet your crowd. A simple test might be just enough to ensure that they are bi-lingual and are capable of doing the job. Also, asking for a proof of qualification like previous experience or education, might be of help along with the test.
Try to identify some sort of hierarchy between your contributors. You would need senior contributors who would review and vet your volunteer translators and do the final quality check before publication.
Content Type
Crowdsourced content should be of medium-to-low-level visibility. It is highly discouraged to crowdsource highly visible or highly technical content. This is your most valuable asset, and you should ensure that it gets translated by professional translators and later undergoes a strict quality assurance process.
Help Documents and Training
Volunteers should be provided with references, contextual information, glossaries, screen shots, and any aiding material that would facilitate their job.
It would be ideal if you could provide some training at the beginning on the tools that they will be using, best practices of translation, and to familiarize them with your business. Always remember that every investment you put in your crowdsourced project will pay off at the end.
Voting System
The voting system is a good way to filter and ensure quality in crowdsourced translation. Using this system, which resembles peer-to-peer feedback, volunteers can vote up or down a version of translation submitted by another volunteer. This system could potentially compensate for the traditional quality assurance process, and it could yield better translations or as good as those done by professionals. You could also structure the voting system to be weighted, which means that contributors with more experience could have a higher casting power (worth two points for instance) than a novel translator.
