Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Collaborative Translation Expands

This month, two interesting developments in the area of collaborative translation:

  • Facebook applies for patent for Community Translation on a Social Network. If you have translated on the Facebook Translation platform, like I have, you know that the tool works very well. The only limitation of community translation, when it is voluntary, is that larger chunks of text never get translated.
  • Swedish newspapers reported yesterday Dan Brown's first new novel since "The Da Vinci Code" will be translated by six translators. The objective is to limit piracy and to prevent impatient fans from buying the English version of the book, by expediting the publishing of the Swedish translation.
What's the relevance of these stories?

Collaborative translation or community translation is taking hold as a valid process for commercial projects. The usual contention is that in order to achieve consistency, it is better to have as few translators working on a project as possible is trumped by the commercial imperative: It is better to have a good translation - even in the literary world - that is delivered on time, than a perfect translation that arrives too late to the market.

1 comment:

  1. Hi!

    It's true that translators should have a collaborative mind so as to deal with large projects, for instance.

    We have discussed these issues here:

    http://blog-de-traduccion.trustedtranslations.com/

    Best regards,

    Amelia

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