Medical Translation Insight

A few months ago, the question "Will crowdsourcing change the translation business?" seemed somewhat rhetorical. Sure, people were talking about crowdsourcing but it seemed to be severely limited in its application.

Since then, Facebook, in particular, has shown that it is serious about crowdsourced translations.

First, it became known that the company applied for a patent for its Translation application. While not the first social networking site to use crowdsourcing as a way to get its site translated, Facebook's tool and process seem to be the smoothest.

Now, Facebook will make its translation tool available to other websites. The New York Times reports today that

the program is called Translations for Facebook Connect, and it is being offered to the 15,000 sites and applications that use the Connect service, which allows visitors to log in using their Facebook ID and password and broadcast some information back to their friends on the social network

This development could prove a boon for Facebook as it seeks to expand the use of the Connect service. Similarly, it could help non-social-network websites leverage Facebook's cachet and infrastructure to tap into the crowdsourcing of translations and avoid the use of professional linguists or machine translation solutions.

Finally some excitement in our business!


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