Julie McDonough Dolmaya | August 24, 2011
While I’ve still got the survey open in my browser, I thought I’d finish writing about the results. This last post will look at the motivations the 76 respondents gave for translating, editing or otherwise participating in a crowdsourced translation initiative. (I should point out that although the question asked about the “last crowdsourced translation [...]
Julie McDonough Dolmaya | August 23, 2011
It’s been quite some time now since my last post about the Wikipedia survey results, and for that I must apologize. I was side-tracked by some unrelated projects and found it hard to get back to the survey. But I’ve just finished revising my article on this topic (which will be published in the November [...]
Julie McDonough Dolmaya | June 12, 2011
This is a follow-up to last month’s post describing preliminary results from a survey of Wikipedia translators. To find out about the survey methodology and the respondent profiles, please read this post first.
I initially planned for this survey to be one of several with translators from various crowdsourced projects, so I wrote the participation-related questions [...]
Julie McDonough Dolmaya | May 30, 2011
This is the first in a series of posts about the results of my survey of Wikipedians who have translated content for the Wikimedia projects (e.g. Wikipedia). Because I’ve already submitted an article analyzing the survey, these posts will be less analytical and more descriptive, although I will be able to discuss some of the [...]
Julie McDonough Dolmaya | February 15, 2011
In Howe’s 2008 book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, which I reviewed here, Howe describes TopCoder Inc., a company that develops software for industry partners by administering programming competitions. Twice weekly, competitions are posted and any of the 200,000+ members of the TopCoder community can compete to [...]
Julie McDonough Dolmaya | January 23, 2011
This weekend, I finally began sending out the invitations for the survey I’ve been preparing on crowdsourced translation initiatives. It asks respondents about their backgrounds, whether they have any formal training in translation, why they have decided to participate (or not to participate) in crowdsourced translation projects, and whether their participation has impacted their lives [...]
Julie McDonough Dolmaya | November 25, 2010
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m in the midst of writing two articles on crowdsourcing and translation, which means I’m busy reading some background material on the topic. I thought I’d post a few quick reviews of the books I’m reading, in case someone else is interested in finding out more about how [...]
Julie McDonough Dolmaya | November 18, 2010
While I was researching a paper I’m writing on the motivations of those who participate in community translation projects, I came across an interesting book on bilingualism:
Bilingual: Life and Reality, by François Grosjean.
At the moment, I’m preparing a survey for people who have participated in any crowdsourced translation project, and I was looking for [...]
Julie McDonough Dolmaya | August 23, 2010
I’m almost finished my paper on translation blogs, and I’m getting ready to move on to my crowdsourcing projects. That’s why I was glad to hear that the editors of Linguistica Antverpiensia accepted my proposal for a special issue on community translation. Here’s what I plan to write about:
If, as Howe (2008: 8 ) argues, [...]
Julie McDonough Dolmaya | July 23, 2010
This morning, I was catching up on the BBC’s Digital Planet podcasts while I was out for a jog, and I heard this interview with Clay Shirky, who argues that worldwide, one trillion hours of spare human time is available on a yearly basis for collaborative efforts such as Wikipedia. He refers to these hours [...]