With so many companies crossing borders and expanding their products and services into new markets, localization is becoming an integral part of international expansion strategies for businesses that want to ensure that they stay ahead of the competition.
Most of these businesses, however, work with tight budgets that usually do not have a specific budget allocated for localization. With the increasing need for localization and the high cost associated with its traditional models, translation crowdsourcing evolved as a possible solution for meeting the needs of these companies at a lower cost. Even larger global companies like Facebook and Twitter moved to translation crowdsourcing as they recognized the power of their passionate communities in helping with the translation of their digital content.
Translation Crowdsourcing Best Practices
Many benefits come with crowdsourcing, but there are few risks as well. Based on my research and studies, I put together two blog posts on translation crowdsourcing best practices. These practices include measures and diverse ways to maintain the quality and quantity of translation and ultimately ensuring the success of any crowdsourcing initiative. You can find these blog posts here:
A Step Further: Translation Crowdsourcing Initiative Simulation
Two colleagues and myself drafted a translation crowdsourcing proposal for a software company named Ollix which owns a travel and exploring game that we have been users for a while. The game, Fog of World, is currently available in 13 languages only. Given the popularity of the game worldwide and the small size of the company that owns the app, we thought that translation crowdsourcing would be a good fit for the company to increase the number of available languages.
We designed a plan with a step by step roadmap on how Ollix could approach this model. We appended the proposal with two additional documents on best practices that could be implemented to ensure the quality and quantity of translation. We recorded a presentation that simulates a real presentation that we would have given to Ollix in which we discuss the proposal in great detail.
