Plenary Session: From Fan Translation to Crowdsourcing: Consequences
..................................of Web 2.0 user empowerment
Dr Minako O’Hagan


Participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006) is spreading on the back of new technological affordances, blurring in some ways the boundary between the professional and the amateur. This presentation explores implications for the translation profession of the phenomenon of “user” participation in translation in the sense of user-generated content. Ranging from fan translation of anime, comics or videogames to groups of users translating Wikipedia and Facebook, translation has become an illustrative example of the emerging concept of crowdsourcing (Howe, 2008).  Crowdsourcing is “distributed problem solving” on the Internet where a self-selected “crowd” contributes to accomplish various tasks in a collaborative and voluntary fashion.  It exploits the Internet’s global connectivity to tap into collective intelligence and self-motivation to solve otherwise intractable problems albeit on the basis of self-selection of the Internet crowd.  Devoted fan groups get together on the Internet to subtitle anime episodes just aired on Japanese TV and make them available online within 24 hours and Facebook is being rapidly translated by its users where the best translation is determined by user voting.  Are these merely a self-indulgent exercise by geeks to be dismissed as a case of translation by amateurs for amateurs? Or is the technological revolution contributing to making legitimate translators out of the crowd, eroding the territory of professional translation? Addressing the conference theme “quality made to measure”, this paper turns attention to the “user” as translation producer and seeks to explore the consequences of user empowerment on quality in the advent of Web 2.0.


References
Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring participatory culture. New York, London: New York University Press.
Howe, J. (2008). Crowdsourcing: why the power of crowd driving the future of business. London: Randomhouse.
O’Hagan, M. (1996). The Coming Industry of Teletranslation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
O’Hagan, M. & Ashworth, D. (2002). Translation Mediated Communication in a Digital World: Facing the challenges of globalization and localization. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.