

Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour. - firebug
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/technology/start-ups/29linkedin.html?src=twr

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patio11
Quality translation is not cheap. This is partially because there are numerous
places where the market for it is not as efficient as it could be. However, it
is mostly because it is _freaking hard_. (I do J->E technical translation for
the day job on occasion. You need to have a superset of the knowledge base of
an intermediate Java engineer to do it well. I got to rewrite a description of
what a SQL injection attack was written by someone who had never used SQL, who
faithfully translated a description they found in a well-known Japanese desk
reference for engineers. They produced comprehensible English which was, well,
wrong.)

Come to think of it, translation is a classic market for lemons, isn't it. The
people who need it the most are the least capable of assessing the quality of
the deliverables, which is why everyone here has heard of All Your Base Are
Belong To Us. This results in both people paying absurd amounts of money for
mediocre translation and, hmm, large companies thinking that their
crowdsourced translation presents their company in the best possible light.

There's so many ways a crowdsourcing solution like this can go wrong. I wish I
could show you a concrete example but I don't have any good examples of
Japanese businesses that used the technique off the top of my head. If you
guys want I can dredge up an example or two from Facebook or whatever, but I'm
not quite as plugged into the Japanese Internet so I miss most of the
inevitable snickering.

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wheels
There's a huge gap between trying to do translation as a non-professional and
the amount of effort required for a professional. I dated a German / English
-> Hebrew translator for a while and despite me being better in both German
and English, she could translate much more effortlessly from German to English
than I could. It's a skill that's separate from raw language ability. She'd
just read a line and then immediately start pounding out the translation.

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Vivtek
Agreed. I translate one and a quarter million words a year. After a while it
truly becomes second nature.

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sachinag
I love clueless product managers who have no idea about communities that they
reach out to. This shit is not hard, folks.

If you are going to try to crowdsource something, you don't wave it in the
face of the paid professionals. It's like asking the AIGA board if they'd like
to do spec work on a redesign of MySpace.

If I was the PM, and I wanted to to take advantage of the fact that LinkedIn
knows it has thousands of translators, I would have queried the pool to
recommend _someone else_ to translate. That's a process story that Facebook
(or Twitter or whoever) can't match.

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vaksel
only 300 people were enraged enough to join the group. That's pretty much the
equivalent of a movie premiere being boycotted by a few dozen religious
nutjobs.

You can't please everyone, and for every "enraged" person, who did the
equivalent of signing an online petition, you have others who are glad to help
and make your product better.

So you as a product manager, would choose to add $200-300K in expenses(for
those professional translation services), just to appease a tiny percentage of
users?

Out of those 300 people, how many do you think LinkedIn will lose as users?
I'm thinking none. So in the end, they lost nothing, and saved a ton of money.

I didn't hear anyone bitching when facebook pretty much did the same
thing...at least LinkedIn is offering some compensation.

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mhp
Welcome to the free market. If there are people that want to do this for free
for LinkedIn and LinkedIn is happy with the translation they do, then why
should anyone else care?

If you want to revolt against people working for free when they should be
paid, come see what some of the "interns" in NYC have to do in journalism and
fashion (and even more industries now there are no jobs out there)

~~~
shabda
Welcome to the free market. If there are people who want to sell drugs, and
people who want buy drugs are happy with it, Why should anyone care?

1\. Because its unethical. 2\. Because its bad for society. There is a reason
minimum wages and employement laws exist.

~~~
Dilpil
I accept your first argument, and reject your second.

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byrneseyeview
It sounds like this is really exaggerating. LinkedIn accounts ain't cheap, and
they do give you ways to contact other professionals. If you could ping
someone and say "I'm interested in doing some translation; for an example of
my work, check out the official Romanian version of LinkedIn," that would be
great. Simply being able to say that you contributed to a site used by the
person you're talking to is a great way to start a conversation that ends with
them writing a check.

~~~
Vivtek
Speaking as a professional translator, I have to agree. But I'm also speaking
as an open-source developer, so I'm used to that model, and the translation
industry isn't. It sounds to me as though LinkedIn could have approached the
matter with some tact, but it should be said that translators as a whole are
pretty prickly. We have to be. The better we are, the less visible we become.

And it's a common scam in the industry (less so now that we congregate online)
to take a document, break it up into chunks, then send each chunk to a
freelancer as a "translation test" to be done free of charge. I think this
LinkedIn thing hit some people that way.

But yeah; mostly, this is one of those sound and fury things.

~~~
kragen
What would be a reasonable alternative to that kind of translation test? The
first thing that came to my mind was critiquing somebody else's translation,
but that has the same problem.

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quizbiz
There is a way to get free labor, make people passionate about your service
and your product and make it super easy. Google translator already does this,
if I translate something from Hebrew to English and it doesn't come out right,
I correct it.

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rriepe
If they want free work done, they should post to craigslist like all the other
sleazy companies do. I'm glad there's a backlash against this.

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lpolovets
A few days ago, there was a post on LinkedIn's blog that discussed the results
of the survey: [http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/06/19/nico-posner-
translating-...](http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/06/19/nico-posner-translating-
linkedin-into-many-languages/)

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robryan
It's possible all the translation would bring would be more offers of free
work for more sites that are big.

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grignr
"I will not buy this record; it is scratched."

