This January I had the pleasure of enrolling in a weekend workshop at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey called “Social Localization/Translation Crowdsourcing”, taught by Adam Wooten. During class, we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of crowdsourcing, some common misconceptions, and best practices for implementing it. We also had the chance to speak with some guest speakers, including Head of Localization at Mozilla Jeff Beatty.

To bring all of this knowledge from the workshop together, our final project consisted of three professional presentations: two infographs made by ourselves, and one mock presentation given to a company of our choice as a group project.

For my infographs, I used the presentation program Visme, and drew inspiration for the color scheme from the Nintendo Switch gaming console because of its simple, eye-catching design that I thought would work well for this pair. I hope the information I’ve included in them can help you in researching crowdsourcing best practices! Click for higher resolution, and feel free to use them so long as the credits at the bottom remain intact.

It was my first time creating an infograph like this, and I’m pleased with the result! I wanted something that would look good hanging beside each other, or at least with a consistent theme that could be used for future presentations.

Bringing Translation Crowdsourcing to the Human Rights Watch

For the group portion of this project, I worked with Daniel Rairigh and Kayla Muñoz in creating a mock community translation campaign (we called ourselves “KD&T Enterprises”, which I think sounds catchy) for the Human Rights Watch, a non-profit organization with a large reach that we feel could benefit from the crowd. Here is an excerpt from the description on their website:

“Human Rights Watch is a nonprofit, nongovernmental human rights organization made up of roughly 400 staff members around the globe. Its staff consists of human rights professionals including country experts, lawyers, journalists, and academics of diverse backgrounds and nationalities. Established in 1978, Human Rights Watch is known for its accurate fact-finding, impartial reporting, effective use of media, and targeted advocacy, often in partnership with local human rights groups.”

The Human Rights Watch offers articles in many languages on their website; however, many of these articles are only available in one language.

Our proposal for them included reaching out to universities to help create a platform to use for translation, and also the implementation of a progress bar/rewards system. Community leaders assigned to different regions would suggest various needs that their locale could use, and by translating content the community would get chances to vote on which need they feel is the most pressing. In this way, Human Rights Watch can get a better picture of where and how assistance is needed, and the translators can see a real, immediate, and potentially life-saving result from their work.

This project required us to record ourselves giving a presentation as if we were actually giving it to staff at Human Rights Watch — a copy of which I’ve included below. In it, we give a brief overview of our community translation proposal (I’m the third person to talk!).

You can also read a more in-depth proposal on the plan here, with supporting documents on maintaining quality and quantity that were included in our theoretical “packet” to Human Rights Watch. They’re similar to the two infographs above, but customized for Human Rights Watch specifically.

Conclusion

Translation Crowdsourcing (Community Translation, Social Localization, etc.) is an exciting tool that when wielded correctly can make monumental tasks manageable — even trivial. It’s also a fascinating and challenging tool, because while there are certain best practices that have been developed, an effective crowdsourcing campaign needs to be customized from the ground up to match whatever project for which it’s being used. It requires a certain amount of client education, too, because there are a lot of misconceptions floating around out there — not the least of which is that it’s free (it is not). It’s also not without risk. But the results that come about from a well-executed crowdsourcing effort can accomplish tasks that would otherwise be impossible, making it well worth your consideration.