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Do you think that volunteer translators (often not professional) are taking away the work to the professional translators?
According to the dotSUB Newsletter June 2011: "The phenomena of a crowd or community stepping forward and doing real translation work, often for no direct financial compensation is something that troubles many in the professional translation world. Mostly because they see this activity as work being taken away from legitimate professionals or they see it as a ploy to reduce prices. [... ] June Cohen has said that the volunteer translators in general do better quality work than the many of the paid professionals, who initially did a few translations to seed the project because of their passion for the subject".
Topics:
Language diversity
John Frum 30+
As machine translation technology keeps improving, more and more professional translators will find themselves with fewer and fewer opportunities for work. Will the opportunities disappear entirely? Unlikely: people still want novels and poems translated, because there is a market of people who'd pay money for these goods, and some of this money helps cover the investment made on translations.
As far as "taking away the work" part goes... I think that's a very narrow-minded attitude. People are worried about their own jobs getting taken away, but they usually do benefit from other volunteers (individuals or companies) in other fields.
Scott Armstrong 50+
Intellectual Property does not sit easily alongside open communication. I expect major conflict over this issue in the very near future..
Comment deleted
Ana María Pérez 200+
Ana María Pérez 200+
Krisztián Pintér 200+
Laszlo Kereszturi 500+
The time needed for the review it was almost the same as the one required for translating from scratch.
Hope this was an accident and will never happen again.
I'm not sure that translation is an art, but I think it needs intuition and empathy and for the foreseeable future machines will not provide this.
Farrukh Yakubov 50+
Krisztián Pintér 200+
translators are worried? they can be.
should we worry? not so much. just as the weaving machine changed who and how makes fabric, new technologies always destroy the old one. (in our case, not destroy, but somewhat shrink). this is called the "creative destruction". progress always comes at the expense of some old processes, as they become obsolete. we want it. we love it.
beware translators! in a few years or decades, we will have computers that can translate better than you can! so better find yourself a plan B. i've warned you!
Laszlo Kereszturi 500+
Revised plan B : prepare to review all those machine translations for good money.
I have decades on my hands.
Laszlo Kereszturi 500+
I think June Cohen nailed it right here:
"... the volunteer translators in general do better quality work than the many of the paid professionals ... because of their passion for the subject".
So it's a matter of passion, like so many other things in life.
And also a time issue, because we are not running against the clock, like a pro.
On the other hand there is the risk issue.
What is the impact of a lower quality translation of a TED talk versus the same lower quality translation of a detailed instruction manual for some expensive piece of technology, industrial process, scientific publication or legal document?
It's obvious that in the second case there is need for a professional translation, to reduce the risk.
From my experience in information security industry, where a lot of tools and services are free, based mostly on passionate volunteers' activity, this combination is the best possible.
So, where there's a risk or you're against the clock, use pro translators.
Farrukh Yakubov 50+
Judge Pau 50+
*smile*
It's a trade off.
Yess.. volunteers covers more ground both in numbers and perspective, but they lack the quality profesional translators are trained for. Clay Shirky explain this in this talk :
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html
Farrukh Yakubov 50+
Judge Pau 50+
as clay shows with flickr as the test case in his talk, those some will carry the quality of the whole volunteers community and gives a misleading presentation of the quality of the volunteers community.
Debra Smith 200+
TED is providing a great benefit to anyone who can access the TED talks. We all owe them a debt of gratitude. If I was proficient in more than one language, I would certainly volunteer my time to translate.
I would hope that no one would get in the way of this great river of knowledge by acting as a dam hoping to save the water or the fees for themselves. One(or a few peoples') person's potential pay cheque should not stand in the way of humanity's progress.
Some of these talks will enable people to learn how to have water in dry places. Some will teach us better ways to a just society. Some will encourage philanthropy.
The good of the many outweighs the good of the one: Mr. Spock- Star Trek.
Catherine Bai