Crowdsourcing in action: translation of the seventh volume of Harry Potter in two days
Radar O'Reilly
retells the story of how the first translation of the seventh book about Harry Potter appeared - the Chinese schoolboy Xiao Won coordinated the work of volunteer translators on-line using the popular chat service QQ.
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All the fun of the story is that against this background, all the usual structures that are built on the "universal equivalent of everything," that is, on money, look pale to sore. While the old media are arguing about monetization and do not believe in the crowd, saying that “these blogs of yours, forums, people-ants cannot repeat the success of commercial journalism, the average level is lower, which means the morgue”, the very people who loner - extremely smart and fearless, use their enthusiasm for their intended purpose - they select the best, think up how to filter and increase that very average level, and instead of the expected “mass character” they create niche phenomena.
A team of sixty people working on one book is nonsense for any publisher. Too expensive, even scary to think. And for any professional community, sixty people who love their work, and even those who have a chance to participate in a project that newspapers write about, so from this point of view, sixty are just a few.
To fall in love with people in work is the real task of web2.0. Developing enthusiasm as a skill , as a commodity and a permanent ingredient - this is what the old media are trying to learn from the new ones. It turns out somehow shitty.
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Chinese translators are not the only ones who excelled in teamwork. The Russian group Potter's Army arranged a similar Sunday, as described by the Akzia newspaper , at the end adding a reference to ITAR-TASS with the story that it was the Brazilians, not the Chinese, who were the first to translate the book into Portuguese.
The information age is just beginning.
retells the story of how the first translation of the seventh book about Harry Potter appeared - the Chinese schoolboy Xiao Won coordinated the work of volunteer translators on-line using the popular chat service QQ.
About two hundred volunteers contacted me [via QQ]. These people we spent through the tests. The test material was paragraphs from English-language articles about Harry Potter from foreign websites. These paragraphs themselves were not part of the novels. Then we checked the quality of the translation.
We recruited people in two waves, of which about sixty people were selected. After the volume was divided, we developed a work plan. Each group consisted of four to five people. For the final result, the chapters had to go through a translation, editing, proofreading and final verification phase to ensure the quality of the translated text.
')
All the fun of the story is that against this background, all the usual structures that are built on the "universal equivalent of everything," that is, on money, look pale to sore. While the old media are arguing about monetization and do not believe in the crowd, saying that “these blogs of yours, forums, people-ants cannot repeat the success of commercial journalism, the average level is lower, which means the morgue”, the very people who loner - extremely smart and fearless, use their enthusiasm for their intended purpose - they select the best, think up how to filter and increase that very average level, and instead of the expected “mass character” they create niche phenomena.
A team of sixty people working on one book is nonsense for any publisher. Too expensive, even scary to think. And for any professional community, sixty people who love their work, and even those who have a chance to participate in a project that newspapers write about, so from this point of view, sixty are just a few.
To fall in love with people in work is the real task of web2.0. Developing enthusiasm as a skill , as a commodity and a permanent ingredient - this is what the old media are trying to learn from the new ones. It turns out somehow shitty.
- Crowdsourcing in action: translation of the seventh volume of Harry Potter in two days @ urbansheep.ru
* * *
Chinese translators are not the only ones who excelled in teamwork. The Russian group Potter's Army arranged a similar Sunday, as described by the Akzia newspaper , at the end adding a reference to ITAR-TASS with the story that it was the Brazilians, not the Chinese, who were the first to translate the book into Portuguese.
200 people of Internet users under the leadership of a 14-year-old girl translated the novel into Portuguese just three days after its official release. Yesterday the story was already posted on the Internet (but without the last 38th chapter) on the portal called “Three Brooms,” ITAR-TASS reports.
The information age is just beginning.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/12908/
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