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 | 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 | 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 [...]
Julie McDonough Dolmaya | March 26, 2010
According to a recent recent article in Translorial, the journal of the Northern California Translators Association, the American Translators Association Board had just declared crowdsourcing one of the top two threats to the profession and the association. It was tied with the economic downturn.
A companion piece that was also part of the February 2010 [...]
Julie McDonough Dolmaya | February 20, 2010
In a recent article in Slate Magazine, Chris Wilson writes about “the myth of Web 2.0 democracy”, citing a number of research projects that have studied user-generated collaborative knowledge systems such as Wikipedia, Del.icio.us and Digg. As Wilson argues, these sites, which seem on the surface to be excellent examples of participatory democracies, where users [...]
Julie McDonough Dolmaya | February 7, 2010
While looking for an article I had read in the Journal of Specialized Translation a few weeks ago, I came across another one by accident, and as it turns out, it discusses social translation (although the author refers to the concept as user-generated translation). Saverio Perrino’s User-generated Translation: The future of translation in a Web [...]
Julie McDonough Dolmaya | January 21, 2010
On my last jog, I listened to a podcast from CBC Radio. In it, Nora Young, host of Spark, interviewed Ethan Zuckerman, who runs Global Voices Online, a community of bloggers working to make blogs from around the world available in various languages. The focus of this interview was on what Zuckerman referred to as [...]