Ever since Facebook managed to localize its site using volunteer translators from the Facebook community, the localization industry has been trying to find ways to harness the power of "the community" to perform translation work. At Glyph we are all for evolution, but keep in mind that even Facebook has paid linguists who keep the whole thing flowing forward with quality localized content.
Crowd-sourcing is certainly a valid strategy for translating certain kinds of content. Regardless of the enthusiasm and dedication of the community, though, content distributors and owners can ensure outstanding quality and consistency in their crowd-sourced localizations by applying language services that are tailored to the needs of this kind of production environment.
Terminology Seeding
If you get three translators in a room and ask them the right way to translate a word you may very well get three different answers...and all of them may be right! That's why it is important to lay a terminology framework before you let the crowd loose on your content. Glyph will help you identify your core terminology and provide you with intuitive and UI-appropriate translations that will keep the crowd on the right track.
Linguistic QA
Let's say that you decide that crowd-sourcing is the right model for your organization. How do you know that the translations are accurate and culturally sensitive? You believe in the crowd, you say? Well, so do we...but we also know that the crowd has been known to make huge mistakes. Glyph can perform a quality audit of your localized content and edit any outlying strings to harmonize the tone and terminology and make sure that the localized version of your content is communicating what you really want it to.
Filling in the Gaps
So what happens if you want to localize your content into Spanish, Portuguese and French but you are only seeing participation from the Spanish and French speakers in the crowd. The Brazilians are just not interested in volunteering. Well, Glyph can help you fill in the gaps on a market-by-market basis so your content can retain a parallel scope of localization across all languages.
Critical Content Releases
Sometime you need to release content at critical moments. Whether it is an announcement regarding a new feature or a new sales offer, you may not have the option of sending content to the crowd for localization without ruining the surprise. Glyph can provide you with timely services to facilitate strategic multilingual content releases.
Crowd Localization Analysis
There is a great opportunity to understand your users better by analyzing the translation choices they make during a crowd-sourced localization project. In particular with software and games, by looking at the words your crowd chooses to describe features and functionality in your product you can gain insight into their perspective and expectations and design new features to feed those tendencies.
