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About meArchives for June, 2009
LinkedIn’s localization problem
LinkedIn is supposed to be like Facebook for grownups. A place to network online in a business context. “Our mission,” the site purposefully states, “is to connect the world’s professionals to accelerate their success.”
This makes its latest overture to the translators among its membership an offensive one. This post gives the gory details, but to summarize, LinkedIn invited translators to participate in a user survey, which kicked off with questions gauging their interest in helping localize the site for other language markets and punched them all in the face with the “how would you like to be compensated?” reply options: a badge to put on your profile, an upgraded account, or just the satisfaction of having helped out. Nothing involving money.
A number of translators immediately filled the “additional comments here” bit at the end of the survey with snide, insulted, and angry comments, to judge from the reactions I saw on Twitter. The fallout for LinkedIn has been a considerable drop in its image in the eyes of translators and booming membership in the “Translators against Crowdsourcing by Commercial Businesses” group hosted right there on the site. (To his credit, LinkedIn representative Nico Posner has been posting in that group’s discussions and trying to explain the company’s move, but the explanations aren’t swaying anyone.)
Why is this? It isn’t as though LinkedIn is the first outfit to try to get a bunch of its content translated for free in this way. The TED Open Translation Project gets the TED conference talks translated and subtitled in a range of languages, all by volunteers. (The site also notes that this project is “generously supported by our sponsor Nokia,” but I guess that generosity doesn’t extend to money for the people doing the work.) Since the TED videos are all released under a Creative Commons license, though, they are free to use, repost, and share with others, so it isn’t as though the TED people are trying to make money off of the labor of the folks producing the translations.
I wrote last May about the way Facebook got its site interface translated into various tongues through the crowdsourcing approach. Here we’re getting closer to the unpleasantness that is a for-profit firm begging for freebies. Two differences, though: First, the Facebook approach used pro translators toward the end of the process, to go over the close-to-final output and make sure it wasn’t still amateurish. (This is admittedly something LinkedIn could be considering.) Second, it fired up a translation application and let any and all comers jump right in and take part, rather than asking experienced translators to do the grunt work without pay. (Which, it should be noted, has not been without problems.)
Which leads me to the biggest mistake that LinkedIn made. The company actually sought out professional translators from among its membership and approached them with this survey. Rather than open the door to college students, who might be interested in the task and have the free time to take it on, or be interested in the potential minor benefit of a “I helped out” badge on their LinkedIn profiles when they try looking for a job through the site one day, the company came to people who can and do charge real money for exactly this sort of job and gave them the survey with no mention of that cold, hard cash. It’s not hard to see why nobody in this group is viewing this as a way to “accelerate their success.”
Anyway. I imagine that LinkedIn will eventually rope some translators-in-training into this job, save money and please the investors, and get localized for a number of new markets. But at the cost of some good will among the language professionals who until this week thought more highly of the site as a place to develop their professional identity online.
Semi-related aside
Chris Salzberg (until March this year one of the authors at Global Voices) gave a presentation in Tokyo recently on social media and translation, in which he pointed out that a group of 240 unpaid Chinese translators translate every article in every issue of the weekly Economist. (Not having attended the talk, I can’t say for sure whether he successfully made the connection between “groups successfully do translation projects on a volunteer basis” and “there is a business model” that his slide seems to suggest.) Chris has an article online at Translation Journal that’s also worth reading if you’re interested in cooperative translation efforts. When you’re talking about purely volunteer work for worthy causes, or unsolicited translations of a magazine that isn’t going to be localized and marketed in a certain country anyway, there are certainly situations where crowdsourced translation plays a valuable role.
Super bonus humor postscript
The About Us page on LinkedIn comes complete with a video whose subtitles you can change to a number of languages, courtesy of whoever produces the things with the tools over at dotSUB. The Japanese subtitles are quite obviously the result of machine translation with minimal human editing, or perhaps a second-year Japanese student with access to Jim Breen’s glossaries. If you read Japanese, by all means check them out; if you can’t, go to a site like Engrish.com and envision the same sort of thing, going the other direction. (I stuck screencaps of the subtitles over here in case you just want the text without the sound and newfangled moving pictures. Clicking the “Video Transcription” bar at the dotSUB page will get you the text data; make sure you select the language you want in the video frame first.)
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