The ideas of crowd-sourcing, community translation, and social media localization appeal to companies looking for a relatively cost-effective solution to translation or wanting to engage more users and build their own contribution communities. However, increasing the volume of contribution to a level high enough to satisfy their needs is likely to be a tough nut to crack for beginners or those on the fence. Nevertheless, there are already several successful predecessors in the industry whose experiences are worth learning from. In this article, I will list the motivating and demotivating factors of such contribution and give out some tips for companies to boost the quantity of translation based on the best practices I’ve learned in the course Social Local/Translation Crowdsourcing.
To increase quantity of translation, the most important thing is to:
- Recruit more contributors through providing and advertising incentives
- Prevent losing contributors by avoiding as many deterrents as possible
Common Incentives for Translation Volunteering:
- An opportunity of a new experience (whether in general or in the sense of professional career building)
- A sense of fulfillment (can be reinforced and amplified by public recognition)
- Fun (not only in the translation task itself, but also in the gamification elements like leader board and badges that facilitate friendly competition)
- Social elements (whether it is a networking chance for volunteers to make new connections, an old connection that drives them to start volunteering, or a sense of belonging to a community)
- Free education/training (which some novice translators or translators-to-be are looking for)
- Internal privileges (such as a higher access level or a special user interface)
- Perks (like free food, transportation fee, schwags, etc)
- More personal causes such as the alignment of values
Common Deterrents for Translation Volunteering:
- Poor management (eg. poor and unfair implementation and enforcement of management policies or standards)
- Mismatched anticipation of job responsibilities and contribution goals
- Lack of recognition
- Low flexibility to do things whenever contributors want or how much they want (not breaking chunks of work down into micro tasks)
- Lack of continuous communication
- Low social motivation such as feeling they are translating/working on it alone
- Inconsistency of motivations
- Competing causes such as contributors finding that they can get paid elsewhere for what they are doing
- A lack of meaningful/good enough feedback
- Complexity of tasks (e.g. long sentences and tag issues sometimes even aggravated by not allowing contributors to skip segments)
After companies make sure that they have as many contributors in their pools as possible, here are some extra-detailed tips on how to achieve higher quantity of translation:
- Make the contribution platform easy and user-friendly
- A clear UI
- A trouble-shooting feature (e.g. FAQs, contributor forum, issue escalation channel, etc)
- Reference materials ready (TM, glossaries, style guide, and auto look-up feature should be in place)
- Make the contribution process fun and a little bit competitive through gamification
- Public recognition system (e.g. badges and leader board)
- Visualization of the translation project progress with a thoughtful theme (e.g. city building or space exploration)
- Progress/status updates on projects and personal records
- Leveling up (to unlock features or a special interface and icon)
- Social media integration (allowing contributors to invite friends and share their achievements)
- Make it effortless for contributors to engage in the process
- Split workload to enable both large and small contribution
- Easy access of the translation/collaboration platforms (e.g. mobile apps)
- Strict Implementation of public recognition and gratitude expression
- Aforementioned recognition system and resume/professional certifications/badges that prove to the public the engagement of contributors
- Simple gifts that stress company spirit like company logo stickers and t-shirts
- Personal relationships through face-to-face meetings/dinner/holiday greeting cards, etc
- Evangelize your companies and products and build a community or fandom
- With a greater passion and belief, contributors will be able to work for you more efficiently and for a longer period of time.
- It’s harder for contributors to stop working on the projects when their valued peers and friends continue to contribute.
