Project management for crowdsourced translation

The community or “crowdsourcing” project model presents opportunities for organizations to translate content that might otherwise not be financially feasible to offer in other languages. In this chapter, the authors find that relying on the voluntary labor of the community raises a variety of traditional and new project management issues. They describe the challenges faced and solutions chosen by four commercial pioneers of community translation: Facebook, Microsoft, Plaxo and Sun Microsystems. Each of these companies recognized the existence of a community willing to volunteer time and expertise in return for some benefit other than direct compensation. Then, the companies actively invested in developing the community, refining processes, incorporating technology, and managing the work.