Translation and Ethics

Crowdsourcing, machine translation, bottom feeding… we all know what these are: threats to professional translators. What we don’t know is just how serious these threats are and what, if any, impact they’ve already had on our industry. On October 8, Tech Crunch published a post called Twitter Needs you to Translate its FIGS. This post tells us about the difficulties Twitter is facing when trying to “expand to the global community” and it describes how other social networking tools like Yahoo Meme have tried to “fill the gap” by offering Twitter-like services in Spanish and Portuguese. Twitter, apparently, is in danger. But do not despair, Twitter plans to “roll out support for FIGS: French, Italian, German, and Spanish […] and while Twitter is going to be doing some of the translations in-house, they are mostly trying to crowdsource translations, which is a strategy that Facebook has used in the past.” Twitter, like Facebook, has found a way to save thousands of dollars on translation. Kudoz to Twitter!

Just for the record, I love Twitter and Facebook. Thanks to these two great social utility tools I was able to reconnect with long lost childhood friends, stay in touch with my relatives, and meet amazing new people. I fully support their efforts to expand to the global community, and as someone who is half-American and half-Argentinean, I know just how much my loved ones in Argentina benefit from having these services in Spanish. What I am uncomfortable with are the ethical implications of crowdsourcing, particularly with Twitter’s added new twist.

Crowdousourcing is a system that social utility tools have been using lately to get their interfaces translated for free. It’s based on user-suggested translations. Volunteer users suggest a translation for a particular sentence or phrase which is posted somewhere on the site, and other users vote for the best translation. The most ironic part of crowdsourcing is that implementing it is not fully free; the site has to spend money developing the features that enable crowdsourcing to work. So it’s not that they are not willing to invest to have their sites translated, they just don’t want to pay actual translators when they have thousands of multilingual users willing to help for free.

Volunteer “translators” on Twitter will be given a level which will be added to their profiles and, according to Tech Crunch, the more their translations are used, the higher their level. Kind of like a game.

The system seems fair and fun enough: participants volunteer so the site isn’t actually forcing anyone to translate for free, and there are many other professions in which people offer their services pro bono. Technically Twitter is not hurting anyone –except pro bono work is usually done for a cause, and I hardly think filling Twitter’s pockets is a worthy cause. Meanwhile, there is much more to it than that. First, translation is not a trade or a hobby; it is a profession that requires training, skills, and constant development. People actually study to become translators because it’s not enough with just being bilingual. Meanwhile, Twitter’s twist to crowdsourcing actually “certifies” a person’s level as a translator (they even use the word “translator”) simply based on popularity and votes by other eager, non-professional translators whose language skills may be great, but might be far from “translator level”. After all, where does Twitter get the authority to “certify” translators? They seem to follow no criteria, other than popularity, for choosing the most suitable translation or assigning levels. It’s almost like certifying a layman’s legal or medical skills based on how well the person is able to answer legal and medical trivia. Would we accept this kind of certification in any other profession? If you were sick, would you hire someone to treat you because they read and understood a couple of medical articles online? If you were on trial, would you hire an eloquent actor as your lawyer to represent you in court? If we respect other professions because of the level of skill and knowledge they entail, why not show the same respect to translation?

Second, the more non-professional translators are willing to translate their profit-earning, social utility tools for free, the more they are affecting overall freelance translation prices. Why would clients pay to have their texts and sites translated by professional translators when they can just hire agencies that use crowdsourcing or Google translator and have a pro “edit” it at half the price? Translation is becoming cheap, not because it’s not a serious profession, but simply because so many people are willing to work in exchange for nothing but online recognition from other users. But is online recognition from other users really enough to make anyone a translator?

However, companies that have the means to pay for their translation services finding ways to get their translations done pro bono is only part of the problem. Although it is true that social utility tools, for the most part, offer their services for free, it is also true that they profit from people using their sites. The more traffic their sites receive, the more their advertising spots are worth or additional products and services they are able to sell, which is where they make their profit. So when they “let” you use the site for free, they are not really giving you any more than what you are giving them. You are in a win-win situation. You get the perks, they get the cash. But when you start saving them thousands of dollars by working for free, where is the reciprocity in your relationship with your social utility tool?

As far as crowdsourcing, a lot of people seem to think there’s not much we can do. It’s here, it works, and it’s profitable. In fact, in the time it took me to write this post, Twitter has already been released in one of its FIGS: Spanish. But what if they’re wrong? What if there is something we can do? In my opinion, there’s still a lot that can be done to prevent practices like crowdsourcing from spreading.

First, as professional translators we can simply not take part in them. Second, we can try to create awareness outside the translation community of the impact and ethical implications of crowdsourcing. Not so long ago, when LinkedIn got enough negative international media coverage for trying to get its site translated using similar methods, it had to succumb to public pressure and cancel the project altogether. Finally, one of the best things we can do to fight unethical practices like crowdsourcing is, as Andrew Bell (author of the blog Running to Work: Thoughts on Translation and Language) would put it, we can be proactive instead of reactive.