Quality and Acceptance of Crowdsourced Translation of Web Content

Abstract

Organizations make extensive use of websites to communicate with people. Often, visitors to their sites speak many different languages and expect that they will be served in their native language. Translation of web content is a major challenge for many organizations because of high costs and frequent changes in the content. Currently, organizations rely on professional translators or machines to translate their content. The challenge is that professional translations is costly and too slow while machine translations do not produce high quality or accurate translations even though they may be faster and less expensive. Crowdsourcing has emerged as a technique with many applications. The purpose of this research is to test whether crowdsourcing can produce equivalent or better quality translations than professional or machine translators. A crowdsourcing study was undertaken and the results indicate that the quality of crowdsourced translations was equivalent to professional translations and far better than machine translations. The research and managerial implications are discussed.