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

Abstract

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.