Cloud marketplaces: Procurement of translators in the age of social media

Abstract

Two decades ago translation buyers relied mostly on professional translators working for language service providers (LSPs). Cloud-based machine translation (MT) and the social web now give them two additional options, raw MT and crowdsourcing. This article reports on the emerging modality of paid crowdsourcing, as conducted since 2008 by companies such as SpeakLike, Gengo, One Hour Translation, tolingo and subsequent entrants into what we term here as cloud marketplaces. Paid crowdsourcing represents an entirely new way of managing translation, and translation buyers seem to be increasingly turning to cloud marketplaces to find it. Thus far, however, this trend has been ignored by both academy and industry observers.

Our initial premise was that cloud marketplaces would fill the gap between raw MT and unpaid crowdsourcing on the one end, and conventional LSP practices on the other. It was expected that, compared with LSPs, cloud vendors would offer faster, less expensive services offset by lower quality. It was also expected that they would offer translators lower rates and poorer working conditions. However, a close reading of the published service offerings indicates that the demarcation lines between cloud marketplaces and conventional LSPs are not as clear cut as first thought.