Crowdsourcing Translation —— Quality control

Some common worries about crowdsourcing may deter people’s interests. A typical one is that how do companies maintain their quality-control (QA) for crowdsourcing translation.

  1. The first practice is to hire LSPs to complete the final reviews of translations, like what Facebook did for their website localization into hundreds of languages. It is a fairly direct way to keep high-quality translation, and do not take much effort for the companies of reviewing, as they hand over the tasks to language providers. Another merit is, professional language providers can help the companies to catch up the deadlines.
  2. An alternative way to maintain QA is to employ a voting system; It is expected that translation with the highest votes will be more likely the better translation. Many translation management systems allow the project managers to choose voting as the way to accept translation. Typically, project managers can decide for how many votes that a translation will be automatically accepted by the system.
  3. For companies which want to localize their products to hundreds of languages, a difficult challenge will be that it is sometimes hard to find enough translators, not to speak of professional reviewers. In such cases, project managers can apply the round robin test——letting each of the competitors to grade all other people, in order to decide the potential best translator.