Can companies obtain free professional services through crowdsourcing?

Twitter launched a Twitter Translation Center Monday in an effort to obtain volunteer translation services from users and localize its user interface into other languages. For years, Facebook and other companies have also been turning to users for volunteer translation in what is often called “crowdsourcing.” These high-profile examples have many companies wondering if they could get volunteers to work for them, too.

Crowdsourcing is not unique to translation. The wisdom and energy of global crowds has been harnessed to create many great resources that you may currently use. Volunteers, both skilled and unskilled, have donated thousands of hours in professional services to create very popular products. Volunteer authors have written more than 17 million articles in dozens of languages to create the popular online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia. More than 100,000 volunteers have indexed more than 500 million genealogical records in 11 languages at FamilySearch.org. Software developers worldwide have likewise put incredible amounts of energy into building the OpenOffice.org desktop software suite and the Linux operating system.

However, crowdsourcing is not all roses and daisies. Various inaccuracies on Wikipedia have made news, and translation crowdsourcing faces similar challenges that must be overcome to create a reliable product. For example, professionals have been quick to point out when volunteers have unintentionally or maliciously blundered translations on Facebook. In one case in 2010, a group of Turkish “translators” banded together to game the system and play an obscene prank. The result was a Turkish user interface on Facebook filled with expletives and insults. Similarly profane “mistranslations” have sneaked through in other languages, too.

“You can’t be sure of what you will get from strangers or crowds as they contain experts as well as opinionated non-experts. It’s a mixed bag,” wrote Utah-based localization management professional Michael Cox and translation technology expert Kirti Vashee. “The counterpoint to this is that with the right process, technology and oversight, you can corral the efforts and knowledge of the crowd to produce a quality product, in many ways better than any subset of people could create. Wikipedia, Apache, OpenOffice and Linux have proven this.”

Does this mean that your company could also obtain free translation and professional services from volunteers just by reaching out and requesting it from the world? Maybe, or maybe not.