See, for example, the list of tools for massive collaborative translation ..... such as âTranslators Without Bordersâ, although we must take into account the fact.
Everyday practices on the Internet and the expansion of crowdsourced translation Titika Dimitroulia Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
1. INTRODUCTION The purpose of this article is to describe the translation of the everyday multilingual, scriptural, multimodal and multisemiotic writing practices on the Internet, a task which is no longer – or at least not only – performed on a professional basis, and thereby as a commercial service offered for a fee; indeed, it is also very often carried out on a non-professional and/or voluntary basis, by non-professional but also volunteer, professional translators, fully assisted by machine translation software and a plethora of collaborative, open source, software applications. 1 Therefore, this article lies at the intersection of at least three already largely interdisciplinary fields: communication and media sociology, i.e. the study of changes that technology has brought to the media, communication, culture and society, with emphasis on the tribe-community theory; the everyday theory, as particularly shaped by Michel de Certeau and transferred to the internet communication by Marianne Franklin; and translation theory, that is the study of translation as a product, a process and a complex social phenomenon: it deals with a form of computer-mediated translation in the context of present day computer-mediated intercultural communication in the cyberspace.2 Having conducted a survey over the Internet as regards the supply and demand of non-professional translation services, we shall attempt to describe the conditions of the development of non-professional translation, as another, new “practice of the everyday” – according to Michel de Certeau’s concept of the everyday 3 – of the interconnected hypermodernity, among the other practices which it helps diffuse and with which it takes part in the antidiscipline, 4 shaped by all everyday practices and tactics of ordinary, dominated people, the "marginal majority" endeavouring to bypass the systems of power and domination. 5 These are consumers-non-producers that are, 1
See, for example, the list of tools for massive collaborative translation http://www.wikitranslation.com/Processes+and+tools+for+massively+collaborative+translation; and best practices for collaborative translations, http://collaborative-translation-patterns.wiki4us.com/tiki-index.php, accessed April 23, 2013. 2 For an overview of participatory and crowdsourced translation practices and their impact on translation and translation studies, see Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González. (eds.), The Translator 18, 2. Special issue: « Non-professionals translating and interpreting: Participatory and engaged perspectives”. Cf also the comprehensive contribution of Alain Désilets, “Translation Wikified: How will Massive Online Collaboration Impact the World of Translation”, in the Proceedings of Translating and the Computer 29 (London, 2007), http://www.mt-archive.info/Aslib2007-Desilets.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013. 3 Michel de Certeau, The practice of everyday life. Transl. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See for example his analysis on the transition from the medieval anti-hero Everyman to Nobody, Nemo, following the quotation from Musil’s The Man without Qualities, page 1 ff., that can be applied also to Internet ordinary users. 4 The term ‘antidiscipline’ is borrowed from Foucault, ibid., xiv-xv. 5 Michel de Certeau, ibid.
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in fact, secretly producers, according to de Certeau (who foreshadows, somehow, the Web 2.0 theory of consumers/users-producers). Our sole purpose shall be to ask some initial questions on the status and impact of non-professional translation (crowdsourcing)6 systematically used in these new everyday scriptural practices of the network and the essential dimensions of our relation with the Other. 2. CYBERSPACE, A NEW INFORMATIONAL ECOSYSTEM, ITS TRIBES AND COMMUNITIES a. A new ecosystem, an ‘antidiscipline’ system
Defined by Pierre Lévy as the new communication space opened by the global interconnection of computers, the term cyberspace “refers not only to the material infrastructure of digital communications, but also to the oceanic universe of information it holds, as well as the human beings who navigate and nourish that universe.”7 One might even argue, following Joël de Rosnay’s perspective, that the Internet is neither a new medium nor a new information and communication technology, but instead a whole “informational ecosystem”, 8 “a relationship technology” (RT), self-organizing and producing a new culture, cyberculture. 9 This collective and collaborative community culture is so open and democratic in its essence, that Joël de Rosnay goes as far as to speak of the emergence of a new “proletariat”, the “pronetariat”, armed with new electronic tools, struggling against traditional infocapitalists, owners of mass media, such as TV, radio, newspapers etc., and fighting for the freedom of the ordinary man, of the “man without qualities”: Pronetariat or pronetarians (from the Greek pro, “before”, “in front of”, “forward”, but also “in favour of”, and the English Net, which means network and is also the colloquial word used in French for the Internet –le “Net”) are two terms I use to refer to a new class of users of digital networks who are able to create, produce, broadcast and sell open or non-proprietary digital content by applying the principles of the ‘new new economy’. 10 This pronetariat emerges from the great marginalised majority of people, who are considered to consume the culture without producing it: Marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive; this cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, 6
The term crowdsourcing was initially proposed by Jeff Howe with no reference to translation. Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing”, Wired 14.06.2006, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html, accessed April 23, 2013; Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2008). 7 Pierre Lévy, Cyberculture (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997), 17. 8 Joël de Rosnay, L’homme symbiotique (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 100. 9 See the 4 web editions according to de Rosnay: Web 1.0 = top-down Internet. Web 2.0 = user-generated contents. Web 3.0 = intuitive, semantic web Web 4.0 = pervasive, symbiotic web http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x47z47_les-quatre-web-de-joel-de-rosnay-du_tech, accessed April 23, 2013. 10 Joël de Rosnay and Carlo Revelli, La révolte du pronétariat (Paris : Fayard, 2006), 12. Our translation.
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an activity that is unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized, remains the only one possible for all those who nevertheless buy and pay for the showy products through which a productivist economy articulates itself. Marginality is becoming universal. A marginal group has now become a silent majority. 11 The practices of this silent majority, excluded from the cultural production, form, in the cyberspace, according to Franklin, “the ordinary users everyday as they commute and commune in the cyberspaces of a noncommercial, openly accessible Internet”,12 where “everyday practices indelibly mark, co-construct, and potentially contest given sociopolitical economic spaces and social orders”. 13 Placing emphasis on the masses but also on their media, de Rosnay adheres thus, in a way, to the hacker movement, defined as a movement supporting the free flow of knowledge and ideas, with the aim of enabling people to use their intellect freely and produce new and innovative ideas.14 This flow is guaranteed only in the “second Internet”– the first being that “of a world of gargantuan electronic financial movements twenty-four hours a day” –, as described by Franklin an Internet that relies upon easy, affordable access to computers and telephone lines, relatively “low-tech” hardware and software configurations, and viable transmission pathways for different technoeconomic political and geographical situations. These Internet’s cyberspaces are where people talkwrite about their everyday lives, confront political and social issues of the day, muse on their (mutual) hopes and fears in what are spontaneous, negotiated sorts of intercultural and intracultural exchange.15 This “second Internet” is an Internet apart and part of the Internet and texts embody online everyday practices.16 Secondary orality, the narrative paradigm and ordinary writings The network has been the privileged space of development and diffusion of “subjugated knowledges”, everyday knowledges, according to de Certeau, who borrows this notion from Foucault, as well as the notion of “discipline” and “surveillance – which the ordinary man escapes by means of intersubjective interactions, ruses performed in his everyday practices, in the ordinary ways of doing things in everyday life.17 Though originally a medium for the elite, the Internet has subsequently become the popular medium par excellence (considering, of course, the digital divide), hosting spatial and scriptural everyday narrations-ruses of those very ordinary people. These subjugated knowledges constitute a multifaceted everyday 11
De Certeau, ibid., xvi-xvii (and passim). Marianne I. Franklin, Postcolonial Politics, the Internet, and Everyday Life (London / New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. 13 Ibid., 49. 14 See Kenneth McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that apart from the permanent interference of everyday practices inside and outside the network, hackers now also meet in metalabs and form new communities, both virtual and real ones. See www.hackerspaces.org, accessed April 23, 2013. , 15 Μarianne Ι. Franklin, ibid., 2 ff. 16 Ibid. 17 Michel de Certeau, ibid., passim. Franklin, ibid., 50. 12
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discourse, both written and oral – at the level of secondary orality on the network 18 but also in multimedia and audiovisual format – textual and pictorial, private and public, flowing freely, encompassing all forms of texts and utterances and multiple semiotic modes. Marianne Franklin describes the cyberspace counterpart of spatial practices of the everyday,19 laying emphasis on the “plus” of the text: in an online quartier, spatial practices of the everyday can be discerned not only in the immediate on-screen content, symbols and conversations, but also in the complete or partial texts left behind in caches, indicated in deletion or “server down” notices, online statistical records like “total hits”, electronic tags like “cookies”, the server logs, email “mailboxes”, the ubiquitous hyperlink itself, the appearance and disappearance of avatars in live chat scenarios, and so on. While these are digital comings and goings, they are nonetheless actual ones, part of a whole new set of polysemic “murmurs” of the everyday that overlie those on the ground (“offline”). The texts comprising these discussions have their own particularities: those of “onlineness,” as we will see. Cyberspatial practices construct other sorts of proximity, (re)embodiment with both familiar and new tactical and/or strategic operations in play.20
Image 1 Server Activity Log
This everyday discursive practice spreads through e-mails, chats, forums, blogs, social networks, videos within the framework of established – and sometimes commercial – communities that provide their members with tools and software facilitating multilingual communication and translation (subtitling on youtube, “translate” function in wordpress, collaborative work platforms, workflow 18
Cf. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2002). 19 De Certeau's assumption on the spatial dimension of the discursive practices represents in a way the reality in the cyberspace. de Certeau, ibid., 148, as cited by Franklin, ibid., 54. 20 Marianne I. Franklin, ibid., 62.
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management software etc.).21 On the network, the ordinary man meets experts as well as non-expert interlocutors; story-subjects and story-tellers, partners in a common discourse, narrators according to Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm, the homo narrans.22 As de Certeau affirms, “a proliferation of stories and heterogeneous operations [that] make up the patchworks of everyday life”.23 This includes ordinary writings/narrations, letters, recipes, personal diaries, notes on various subjects, invitations, evaluations, presentations, song lyrics, photos and videos, advertisements, subtitles, news and all forms of texts and discourses. It also includes political texts, texts arguing for immigrant integration, religious texts, texts concerning games, codes, routines as well as entire books and the most elementary form of everyday contact. This multiple, multiform multimodal and multisemiotic (images, video, audio features are usually embedded) scriptural/textual/narrative fabric is the expression of an equally multiform everyday activity, both material and immaterial, and it needs to be translated in order to meet more or less imperative and urgent communicational needs: sharing, communicating and acting. b. The network, its tribes, its communities The phenomenon of non-professional translation, placed in the core of this countercultural production and mining the stereotypes of the translation studies discipline, 24 is complex, as demonstrated by the number of terms used for it. Anthony Pym notes: unprofessional translation, paraprofessional translation, lay translation, community translation, untrained translation, crowdsourcing (by analogy with outsourcing), non-professional translation, collaborative translation, volunteer translation.25 O’Hagan uses the term user-generated translation, adopted also by Perrino; and Cronin uses the terms open, crowdsourced and wiki translation.26 Désilets includes it
21
The web 2.0 specifically is also called "second web", containing social networking sites and content sharing sites, as the ones mentioned above. See danah boyd and Nicole Ellison "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, 1(2007): article 11, http://www.danah.org/papers/BlogTalksReloaded.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013. 22 Walter Fisher, “The Narrative Paradigm. In the beginning”, Journal of Communication 35, 4 (1985): 74-89; Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987/1989). 23 de Certeau, ibid., 20, as translated and cited by Franklin, ibid. 51. 24 Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González, ibid., 157-158 25 Antony Pym, Translation research terms – a tentative glossary for moments of perplexity and dispute, http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/research_methods/2010_terms.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013. 26 Minako O’Hagan, “Fan Translation Networks: An Accidental Translator Training Environment?”, in Translator and Interpreter Training: Issues, Methods and Debates, ed. John Kearns (London / New York, Continuum, 2008), 158-183; Saverio Perrino, “User-generated Translation: The Future of Translation in a Web 2.0 Environment”, Journal of Specialised Translation 12 (2009): 55-78, http://jostrans.org/issue12/art_perrino.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013; Michael Cronin, “The Translation Crowd”, Revista tradumàtica 8 (2009): 1-7, http://www.fti.uab.cat/tradumatica/revista/num8/articles/04/04.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013.
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in “Massive Online Collaboration”-MOC.27 Guyon depicts the diversity of collaborative and community crowdsourced translation.28
Image 2 www.cucumis.org
Of course, this is not the first time in history that translators collaborate in the context of a project.29 Probably, though, it is the first time that this collaboration is so intense: the expansion of crowdsourcing is explained not only by technology innovation but also by the deep changes of our age, an era of migrations and intense cross-cultural communication through multiple strategies, covering multiple cultural needs – outside the official, institutional cultural systems. 30 “The boundary between the professional translator and the amateur is no longer clear”, as O’Hagan points out, 31 and professional and non-professional translators translate through various structures and with various objectives the everyday contents of the Internet, thus of our world, especially but not exclusively in Web 2.0 applications.32 In our attempt to clarify the content and forms of crowdsourced translation, it would be useful to look at the tribes and communities of the network, whose action takes place in cyberspace as part of the real world. 33 Adhering critically to the theory 27
Alain Désilets, ibid. Cf: A. Désilets, L. Gonzalez, S. Paquet, M. Stojanovic (2006). "Translation the Wiki Way". Proceedings of the WIKISym: 19. doi:10.1145/1149453.1149464. ISBN 1595934138. 28
André Guyon, “The ups and downs of online collaborative translation , L’ Actualité langagière 7, 1, (2010): 33, http://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tpv2guides/guides/favart/index-fra.html? lang=fra&lettr=indx_autr8o7vhUcC4c0s&page=9Q0FtHBZRpRk.html, accessed April 23, 2013. 29 See, for example, James St André, "Lessons from Chinese History: Translation as a Collaborative and Multi-Stage Process”, TTR 23, 1 (2010): 71-94 30 Anthony Pym, “Interview on current issues in Translation Studies”, http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/online/research_methods/2010_interview.pdf 923.4.13), accessed April 23, 2013. 31 Ibid, 97. 32 For methodological reasons, the term translation is covering here also interpretation. 33 Cf. the European Commission contribution to the matter, published in May 2012 and defining, describing and evaluating crowdsourcing and its impact on translation practice. http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/publications/studies/crowdsourcing_translation_en.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013.
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of neotribalism, which presents some very interesting methodological tools, we define the “tribe/neo-tribe”, according to Federico Casalegno,34 as “a temporal crystallization of persons sharing pleasures, emotions and moments of empathy”, whereas the “community” “is formed by autonomous individuals who have different roles and goals to achieve”35 – yet making a distinction, following Pierre Lévy’s perspective, between the community36 and the virtual community, which “is simply a group of people who are in contact by means of the cyberspace. The extent of this may vary from a simple temporary e-mailing list to virtual communities whose members maintain strong and long-lasting intellectual, emotional and social relationships, such as the Well community described by Howard Rheingold. 37 There is thus a continuum of possible intensity or involvement in virtual communities”. 38 In both cases we are dealing, in some way, with community relationships, although communities constitute “structured aggregations among individuals, which are targeted, hierarchical and instrumental”, whereas tribes are “more ephemeral forms of association, transversal and empathic, among people who play in the theatre of everyday life”39 – without excluding the element of empathy from the community formation. Starting with tribes (which can under circumstances be transformed into communities) acting in the context of cultural production, we can mention groups of fans of video games, films, comics etc., such as scanlation (scan & translation) groups, whose members scan Japanese manga comics and translate the dialogues (sometimes they even write new ones, in which case we use the term scangine);
34
On the notion of tribe, see Michel Maffesoli, Le temps des tribus (Paris: Editions de la Table Ronde, La petite vermillon, 2003) Du nomadisme. Vagabondages initiatiques (Paris Editions de la Table Ronde, 2006); “Tribalisme postmoderne. De l’ identité à l’identification », http ://1libertaire.free.fr/Maffesoli04.html, accessed April 23, 2013. 35 Federico Casalegno, “Entre tribalisme et communautés; des configurations sociales émergeantes dans le cyberspace”, http ://www.ceaq-sorbonne.org/node.php?id=97&elementid=94 ; accessed April 23, 2013. Our translation. 36 On the notion of virtual community, see also Serge Proulx; Louise Poissant et Michel Sénégal (eds.), Communautés virtuelles : penser et agir en réseau ( Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2006) ; Serge Proulx, Françoise Massit-Folléa et Bernard Conein (eds.), Internet, une utopie limitée. Nouvelles régulations, nouvelles solidarités (Québec : Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005); Serge Proulx and Guillaume Latzko-Toth, “La virtualité comme catégorie pour penser le social : l’usage de la notion de communauté virtuelle”, Sociologie et sociétés XXXII, 2 (2000): 99-122. 37 Howard Rheingold, “A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community,” in Linda M. Harasim (ed.), Global Networks: Computer Networks and International Communication (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 57–80. 38 Pierre Lévy quoted by Federico Casalegno, ibid. 39 Ibid.
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Image 3 http://insidescanlation.com/spotlight/manga-jouhou.html
fansubbing groups, engaging in subtitling animation programs (also Japanese), known as anime; fanfiction or fanfic groups, formed around fiction written by fans of television series, films, animation (anime), video games, books or comics, inspired by the universe and/or the characters of the work they admire. These stories can also be translated on a voluntary and non-professional basis. Some theorists argue that scanlation and fansubbing practices can be perceived as a resistance to mainstream aesthetics and politics in a globalized world explaining thus the contribution of those practices of participatory culture 40 to the de Certeau’s antidiscipline.41
40
Cf. Samuel Archibald’s genealogy of participatory culture, “Épître aux Geeks: Pour une théorie de la culture participative", Kinephanos 1, 1 (2009), http://www.kinephanos.ca/2009/epitre-aux-geeks-pourune-theorie-de-la-culture-participative/, accessed April 23, 2013. 41 Jorge Díaz Cintas, Pablo Muñoz Sánchez. “Fansubs: Audiovisual Translation in an Amateur Environment”, Jostrans. The Journal of Specialised Translation. 7, 6 (2006): 37-52, http://www.jostrans.org/issue06/art_diaz_munoz.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013. Luis Pérez Gonzáles, “Amateur subtitling as immaterial labour in digital media culture”, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19, 2 (2012): 157-175; “Fansubbing Anime: Insights into the ‘Butterfly Effect’ of Globalisation on Audiovisual Translation”, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 14, 4 (2006): 260-277, http://www.scribd.com/doc/12629008/Fan-Subbing-Anime, accessed April 23, 2013. See also Tessa Dwyer, “Bad-Talk: Media Piracy and ‘Guerilla’ Translation”, in Rita Wilson and Brigid Maher (eds.), Words, Images and Performances in Translation (London / New York: Continuum, 2012), 194-215.
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Image 4 http://www.fanfiction.net
There are also tribes, though, formed around social networks such as Facebook
Image 5 http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/04/02/now-you-can-help-translate-facebook-intoany-language/
or search engines leading to data/information – often confused with knowledge― such as Google:42
42
For the great difference between content, information and knowledge, or the DIKW Pyramid (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom), see Jay H. Bernstein, revisiting Ackoff’s model, “The DataInformation-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy and its Antithesis”, https://journals.lib.washington.edu/index.php/nasko/article/viewFile/12806/11288, accessed April 23, 2013.
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Image 6 http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/speaking-in-more-languages.html
Image 7 http://kamranbrohi.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/help-translate-google-into-yourlanguage-sindhi/
The particularity of the tribes translating for Facebook or Google lies in the fact that their members offer their services to public companies listed on the stock exchange, justifying criticism pronounced against crowdsourcing, such as the Yang thesis about “aggravated corporate exploitation”43 and illustrating the ever-growing interest of companies in taking advantage of “crowdsourcing” for their own profit 43
Ling Yang, “All for Love: The Corn Fandom, Prosumers, and the Chinese way of Creating a Superstar”, International Journal of Cultural Studies 12, 5 (2009): 527.
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purposes.44 However, this interest for volunteer translation demonstrates above all the vitality of this activity and its plus-value in the framework of intercultural communication as well as the cultural power of social networking, making us wonder if, in the context of these operations, there are not ruses that bypass the commercial dimension in a subversive way. The greatest, most studied and cited tribe, though, is the Wikipedia team, that is not exactly a team, but an association of individual interests and efforts, which enrich and promote the Wikipedia project of free knowledge dissemination, the most influential project probably on the Internet:45
Image 8: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Translation
As regards more or less structured communities, we will start with volunteer translation communities, supporting non-profit humanitarian organizations and NGOs such as “Translators Without Borders”, although we must take into account the fact that, as Mona Baker demonstrated, this association is linked with a commercial firm, and thus its "narrative” is incoherent.46
44
See the report by the research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory on non-professional translation and how its clients can benefit from it: http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/AbstractView.aspx?ArticleID=1317, accessed April 23, 2013. Common Sense Advisory in order to refer to the crowdsourced translation has coined the acronym CT3. 45 See Julie Mc Donough Dolmaya, “Analysing the crowdsourcing model and its impact on public perceptions on translation", in Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva, and L. Pérez-González. (eds.), ibid., 167-191. 46 A non-profit association established in 2010 as a sister organization of Traducteurs Sans Frontières, founded in 1993 by Lexcelera (groupe Eurotexte). See Mona Baker, “Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community”, The Massachusetts Review 47, 3 (2006): 462-484; a revised version of the text in Translation, Resistance, Activism, ed. Maria Tymoczko (Amherst / Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 23-41.
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Image 9 http://www.translatorswithoutborders.org/
Much more interesting and coherent is the project of the Rosetta Foundation, promoting equality through linguistic and cultural diversity.47
Image 10 http://www.therosettafoundation.org/blog/volunteer-with-us/
and the Kiva project, which the Kiva team describes as follows : "a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty", and is obviously supported by volunteer translation.48 47
About localization for social purposes, cf. Dimitra Anastasiou and Reinhard Schäler, “Translating Vital Information: Localisation, Internationalisation, and Globalisation”, Synthèses 3 (2010): 13-27. 48 http://www.kiva.org/about, accessed April 23, 2013.
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Image 11 http://www.kiva.org/volunteer#reviewTranslationProgram
Among the first users who resorted either to self-translation or to nonprofessional/volunteer translation are the supporters of the free software movement, hackers belonging to open but strongly motivated communities such as the GNU/FSF, founded by Richard Stallmann, or the LINUX community, founded by Linus Torvalds. The free software community (and free does not simply mean free of charge, but freely distributed and collectively developed) 49 provides, among other things, the infrastructure of new media of the masses which, as optimists see it, will soon replace the mass media.50
49
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html, accessed April 23, 2013.
50
For this essential turn, besides de Rosnay's contribution (see footnote 10), cf. Ignacio Ramonet, L’Explosion du journalisme. Des médias de masse à la masse des médias (Paris : Galilée, 2011), where he depicts the current transformation of the media ecosystem.
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Image 12 The GNU community
Image 13 The GNU community in Greek
Nevertheless, advocating free access to resources, primarily to source codes and software, these hackers in both senses of the term meet with the pronetariat, the creators of entirely volunteer-based citizen media.
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Image 14 http://globalvoicesonline.org/
15
Image 15 www.agoravox.fr
Finally, the most studied and most cited groups in translation theory bibliography are communities engaging in political activism, such as Ecos and Babels 51
51
There is a large bibliography on activist translating communities. See Julie Boéri, “Translation/Interpreting Politics and Praxis The Impact of Political Principles on Babels’ Interpreting Practice”, Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González. (eds.), ibid., 269-90; Julie Boéri and Carol Maier Compromiso Social y traducción/interpretación - Translation/interpreting and Social Activism (Granada: Ecos, 2010); Yan Brailowsky and Maria Brander de la Iglesia, “Babels, la traduction et l’éthique hacker: la liberté en action?”, Actes de la 1ère Journée d’étude Traduction et Mondialisation (8th December 2007), http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/T3L/IMG/pdf/Y._Brailowsky__M._Brander_de_la_Iglesia.pdf , accessed April 23, 2013.
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Image 16 www.babels.org
Or Tlaxcala, the international network of translators for linguistic diversity
Image 17 http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/
4. TRANSLATION AS AN ALTERNATIVE EVERYDAY PRACTICE ON THE NETWORK
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Translation-localization most of the time, with the use of various software applications,52 such as the wordpress translation plugin shown below that provides translation of blog content
Image 18 http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gts-translation/
or the platform developed by the proz translator community for “Translators Without Borders”
52
On the non-professional dimension of localization, see Anthony Pym, “Website localization”, http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/translation/2009_website_localization_feb.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013.
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Image 19 http://www.proz.com/screening-platform/overview?cid=1197983
non-professional translation on the Internet can be defined as: 1. translation offered to support a cause in the framework of a community, on a
voluntary and/or collaborative basis, involving multilingual persons who are not professionals, yet without excluding professionals from this community; this type of translation is unprofessional, lay, community, untrained translation, crowdsourcing, non-professional, collaborative, volunteer translation. Nevertheless, collaborative, community, voluntary/volunteer translation and crowdsourcing may also refer to professionals, in which case we can eventually use the term paraprofessional translation. 2. translation offered in the context of a tribe, most often not involving professionals, which can also be characterized as unprofessional, lay, community, untrained translation, crowdsourcing (by analogy with outsourcing), non-professional, collaborative, volunteer translation. 3. translation offered in order to facilitate elementary everyday communication by communities such as cucumis, whose emergence, however, highlights an urgent need for human translation as opposed to machine translation offered over the network. This observation can orient machine translation research towards fields where repetitive content and limited vocabulary can provide reliable results. On the network, as it turns out that even the simplest human translation is better than machine translation, the latter can only be of interest in terms of information extraction. Casalegno’s definition of tribes and communities, though, meets, in a way, Walter Fisher's definition of two types of narrative communities, a model already 19
used by Mona Baker in order to describe the activist translators’ and interpreters’ communities.53 According to Fisher, cited by Baker, “the first type of community is created by concession or conformity: members of the community adhere to a story because it provides justification for a way of life that leads to success or survival. The second type is created by election or conversion; one becomes a member of such a community because the story that brings its members together provides an "honored perception of oneself".54 If we accept, along with Mona Baker, Fisher’s thesis, it is obvious that translation type 1 falls within the latter category, while tribes are in between the two and type 3 underlines the new challenges of intercultural communication. Non-professional translation type 1 is thus associated with values and ethics, the ethics of translators as citizens, their responsibility and their choices in conflicting political situations.55 Hacker communities as well as communities of activists and those supporting humanitarian causes are governed by ethics based on solidarity and responsibility, ultimately leading to increased awareness of the translator’s role as well as of the nature of translation. 56 Hacker communities are working for language standardization in translation,
Image 20 Project on language standardization and collective work of the Linux community
53
Walter Fisher, “Narration, Reason and Community”, in Memory, Identity, Community: the Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, eds. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 307-27. Mona Baker, “Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community”, ibid. 54 Walter Fisher, ibid., 323, cited by Baker, ibid., 472. 55 See, Mona Baker, Translation and conflict (London / New York: Routledge, 2006); See “Tlaxcala’s Manifesto”. (2006), http://www.tlaxcala.es/manifiesto.asp?section=2&lg=fr, accessed April 23, 2013; Verena Jung and Maria Brander de la Iglesia. “Free as in free beer vs. free as in free speech: Volunteer Translation on the Internet”, in Translation, Technology and Culture, ed. Ian Kemble (Portsmouth: University of Portsmouth, 2007), 61-79. 56 Ibid.
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activist communities such as Babels even provide translation training.57
Image 21 Training for volunteer non-professional translators
Nevertheless, as Mona Baker argues, these communities are narrative communities, and their stories must be characterized by coherence and fidelity. In this context, Translators Without Borders don’t meet the ethical standards, as they are dependent of a private society. 58 Conversely, within communities like “cucumis” not only is translation quality and function not a major concern, but translation is generally limited to the “meaning” of utterances –and this is highlighted by the site.
57
http://www.babels.org/spip.php?rubrique27; http://www.babels.org/wiki/TrainingandSelectionJune06, accessed April 23, 2013. See also Yan Brailowsky and Maria Brander de la Iglesia, “Babels, la traduction et l’éthique hacker: la liberté en action?”, ibid. 58 Mona Baker, ibid., p. 477 ff.
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Image 22: This translation request is «Meaning only»
Finally, as regards tribes, such as groups of fans, they are driven, by the nature of the works, towards an aesthetic preoccupation, although they do not often develop a metadiscourse on translation. Still, we do find discourse on translation evaluation within these communities:
Image 23 http://forums.mangafox.com/threads/165585-Translation-Quality-by-Shinhou
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Thus, the complexity of crowdsourced translation reflects the complexity of everyday communication on the net, which is a simple dimension of our world. The sociological perspective in which it is studied today is perhaps the most accurate macro-approach for the phenomenon, which has a serious impact on translation, as practice and education. As this everyday text, though, is a multimodal and multisemiotic text, semiotics can contribute a lot to its definition on a micro-level, which finally falls definitely into the social. V. IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION Joël de Rosnay characterizes pronetarians as “professional amateurs”, “pro-ams”. His term could also be used for translators belonging to communities, or maybe even to certain tribes, depending on their norms and objectives.59 For any other activity reducing translation to a mere “transcoding”, the term “non-professional translation” seems to be the most neutral one. However, given the complexity of the phenomena and the rapid pace of change, we can only ask questions about the future, as regards the important aspects involved in this new form of translation, associated with our culture and our existence in the world. Obviously, as Pérez-González underlines, translation studies must take into account the non-professional and collaborative dimension of the translation practice. 60 In consequence, translation studies must address the transformation of the translation field and reform their perspectives, taken into account the fact that non-professional translation has contributed to the intercultural dialogue throughout human history. 61 Many subjects must be studied, in the context of this reform and re-orientation, that is not only practical, but also conceptual – in the sense that Somers and Gibson give to the term conceptual narrative, revisited by Baker: "stories and explanations that scholars in any field elaborate for themselves"; and also influential metanarratives / master narratives, that shape our conscience as citizens and contemporary actors of history.62 For example, concerning the transmission of information, the questions are if transmission of altered information is preferable to no transmission at all and what is the impact of this alteration when very serious political and social issues are involved. Pym, for example, suggests that we must abandon “all pretence to perfect understanding; we should attempt to grasp the pragmatics of “good enough” strategies”, “as translation cannot be studied in isolation from alternative strategies for cross-cultural communication (language learning, pidgins, code-switching, bilingual conversations)”.63 Désilets, depicting the differences between traditional and massive online collaborative translation workflow, points out some very important dimensions of this critical change, concerning, for example, the impact of collaborative translation on minority and small languages, its contribution to the improvement of machine translation and open terminological databases. 64 Other 59
For example, the International Children’s Digital Library is a very interesting case in point. See Hilary Browne Hutchinson, Benjamin B. Bederson and Allison Druin, “The International Children’s Digital Library: A Case Study in Designing for a Multi-Lingual, Multi-Cultural, MultiGenerational Audience”, Information Technology and Libraries, 24, 1 (2005): 4-12; http://en.childrenslibrary.org, accessed April 23, 2013. 60 Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González, ibid, 149-152. 61 Anthony Pym, Negotiating the Frontiers: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History (Manchester: St. Jerome, 2000). 62 Mona Baker, ibid., 465 f. 63 Anthony Pym, “Interview on current issues in Translation Studies”, ibid. 64 Alain Désilets, ibid.
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questions that arise from crowdsourcing concern the author’s rights, for whom and how; the protection that should be provided for free and volunteer-based works in relation to commercial companies (see ‘delicious’ and the use of its “non-personal data” for advertising purposes)65 but also the measures to be taken in order to prevent unfair competition and dumping when crowdsourcing supports commercial businesses;66 what training should be provided for volunteer translators and what quality control mechanism can be established by structured communities; at last but not least what education there should be for translators, encompassing the values of peace, democratic citizenship, justice and solidarity, as translation is not a process in vitro. The discussion is open and the only thing that is certain is that, as an everyday practice of a society which very soon will live inside the Internet, 67 non-professional translation will be at the heart of the translation theory discussion as well as of the sociological and media debate. Bibliography Anastasiou Dimitra and Reinhard Schäler. “Translating Vital Information: Localisation, Internationalisation, and Globalisation”, Synthèses 3 (2010): 13-27. Archibald Samuel. “Épître aux Geeks: Pour une théorie de la culture participative", Kinephanos 1, 1 (2009), Accessed April 23, 2013. http://www.kinephanos.ca/2009/epitre-aux-geeks-pour-une-theorie-de-la-cultureparticipative. Baker, Mona. “Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community.” The Massachusetts Review 47, 3 (2006): 462-484. Baker, Mona. Translation and conflict. London/New York: Routledge, 2006. Bernstein, Jay H. “The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy and its Antithesis.” Accessed April 23, 2013. https://journals.lib.washington.edu/index.php/nasko/article/viewFile/12806/11288. Boéri, Julie. “Translation/Interpreting Politics and Praxis The Impact of Political Principles on Babels’ Interpreting Practice.” The Translator 18, 2. (2012): 269-90. Special issue: “Non-professionals translating and interpreting: Participatory and engaged perspectives”, edited by Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González. 65
http://deliciousbrains.com/privacy-policy/, accessed April 23, 2013. See the translator’s group against commercial business use of crowdsourcing in linkedin. http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Translators-against-Crowdsourcing-Commercial-Businesses2032092?home=&gid=2032092, accessed April 23, 2013. 67 According to de Rosnay “Demain on ne sera pas sur Internet mais dans Internet” (“Tomorrow we will not go on the net, we will live inside the net”). http://www.rendezvousdufutur.com/archivearchive_rosnay-9-30.html, accessed April 23, 2013. 66
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