Of professionals, non-professionals and everything in between: redefining the notion of the ‘translator’ in the crowdsourcing era

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the potential impact of ‘paid translation crowdsourcing’ on translators’ status through a corpus study of discourses found in language industry websites. It has been argued in Translation Studies literature that in this model crowdsourcing companies attempt to redefine translation ‘professionalism’ or ‘competence’ as a monolithic notion to include a dynamic range of price segments supposedly associated with degrees of translation competence and fitness-for-purpose. The results of the corpus study show that industry websites present a range of ‘expertise’ or ‘skillset’ in which different levels of translation competence associated with different content types and fit-for-purpose tiers coexist. The study concludes that published materials in themselves do not display the potential to impact the status of translators negatively, but rather the opposite: the website materials reinforce that for some content types or high-quality levels, high levels of expertise and professionalism are required. Nevertheless, this might not be necessary for all translation projects, content types and-or client needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Crowdsourcing
• paid crowdsourcing
• corpus studies
• translators’ status
• translation quality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Jiménez-Crespo (2017a, 73–82) for further information about approaches to text segmentation in crowdsourcing workflows.

2. Meaning that single texts are not routinely divided into chunks and distributed to a collective of freelance translators using a crowdsourcing workflow.

3. For example, Textmaster includes the following formulations that associate translation competence levels to price tiers (1) ‘Native translators approved by Textmaster/non full time’ (2) ‘Native translators approved by Textmaster – full time’ or (3) ‘Specialist native professional translators’. These levels are also associated to different types of content. This is the full description for the ‘Standard level’: ‘Standard level is provided by native translators who have been tested and approved by Textmaster, translating in addition to their other professional activities. It is suitable for simple translations of short texts without specific vocabulary’ (Textmaster 2023).

4. Sketchengine is an online corpus analysis tool that allows to automatise a number of corpus processing and corpus analysis tasks (https://www.sketchengine.eu/, last accessed 13 September 2023).

5. Additional corpus data has been added to the GitHub repository: https://github.com/jiménezmiguel/The_Translator_Paid_Crowdsourcing (last accessed 15 September 2023).

6. For a description of the differences between wordlists and wordsketch visualisations in Sketchengine, see Kocincová et al (2015).

7. The complete data for the Wordsketch for the lemma ‘translator’, including frequency and scores, can be found in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/jiménezmiguel/The_Translator_Paid_Crowdsourcing (last accessed 15 September 2023).

8. The complete data for the Wordsketch for the lemma ‘quality’, including frequency and scores, can be found in the GitHub repository at https://github.com/jiménezmiguel/The_Translator_Paid_Crowdsourcing (last accessed 15 September 2023).

9. Blacklists are commonly used in keywords analyses in corpus studies to eliminate high frequency function words such as pronouns, determinants, common prepositions, etc.

10. https://www.sketchengine.eu/ententen-english-corpus/ (last accessed 13 September 2023).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Rutgers Council Grant; Research Council, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Notes on contributors

Miguel A. Jiménez-Crespo

Miguel A. Jiménez-Crespo is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers University, where he directs the MA program in Spanish Translation and Interpreting. He holds a PhD in Translation and Interpreting Studies from the University of Granada, Spain. His research focuses on the intersection of translation theory, translation technology, digital technologies and artificial intelligence, corpus-based translation studies and translation training. He is the author of Localization (Routledge, forthcoming), Crowdsourcing and Online Collaborative Translations: Expanding the Limits of Translation Studies (John Benjamins, 2017) and Translation and Web Localization (Routledge, 2013). His papers have appeared in the top -tier Translation Studies journals such as Target: international journal of translation studies, Meta: journal des traducteurs, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, Linguistica Antverpiensia, TIS: Translation and Interpreting Studies, Jostrans: The journal of specialized translation, Translation and Interpreting, or Translation, Cognition and Behavior. He has been a member of the board of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association (ATISA) since 2012.