Professional translators have mixed attitudes towards collaborative translation and crowdsourcing. While they readily adopt technologies that help their work, they resist those that lower compensation or quality. Translators make significant use of electronic resources but prefer tightly controlled ones. Collaborative resources are growing in acceptance but not yet mainstream. Translation crowdsourcing is highly controversial as it may disrupt fair pay and produce low-quality work.

1. Translation and Crowd Sourcing: Opportunity or Heresy? Professional translators’ attitudes towards massive collaboration Alain Désilets Conseil national de recherches du Canada

2. “ The most reliable way to forecast the future is to try to understand the present.” “ Trends, like horses, are easier to ride in the direction they are going.” -- John Naisbitt "You have to talk to [customers], watch them; this is the only way to understand their interests, their motives, their needs". -- Donald Norman

4. 25 subjects Organization type large (250+ employees) LSPs (13), medium (<30 employees) LSPs (6), freelance (2), academic (2), amateur(2) Type of work “ conventional” translation (15), MT-Post Editing (8), Revision (2) Language pairs English -French (13),English-Spanish (6), English-Japanese (2) , Portuguese-Spanish (1), Chinese-English (1), English+Italian-Estonian (1), English-Inuktitut (1) Years of experience Ranged from < 2 years up to 20+ years. Source text domain Aboriginal affairs, Municipal affairs, Public administration, Education, Legal, Health, Software manual, Politics, Job offers. Source text length Min: ~20, Max:7000 Country Canada (15), Europe (5), US (3), Japan (2) Professional translators All but 2.

7. Are professional translators technology averse?

10. Tools, Tools, more Tools! (2) Translators use a wide range of tools when resolving translation problems. Vast majority of those are electronic. p < 0.001

13. Searching Bilingual Sites

14. Searching Bilingual Sites (2)

18. Attitudes and workpractices with respect to collaboratively built linguistic resources

25. Use of Translated Material Our subjects frequently searched in bilingual Canadian sites for French equivalents. Estimated 75% of French content on those sites was translated. Thus, in 75% of the case, this strategy ended up yielding solutions taken from translated material. Frowned upon in Terminology, and, to a lesser extent in Translation. But our subjects did it anyway. Here’s why…

29. Use of collaborative sources is not that common yet, but growing. Collaborative resources go against the grain of some translator attitudes, but nothing that can’t be surmounted. Need to address perception of quality and trustworthiness. Cannot expect majority of translators to contribute.

30. Attitudes and workpractices with respect to collaborative translation

36. Conclusions

38. Questions?

39. Thank you for your attention. For more details… Alain Désilets National Research Council of Canada [email_address]