As a college freshman (way back when), I took an advocacy workshop, during which one of the speakers screened a beer commercial similar to the following one and asked us to think about the company’s goal in creating the ad.
After we rambled off the predictable patriotism and support-our-troops themed answers, the speaker brought us back to reality. “The point of ANY beer commercial,” he said, “is TO SELL MORE BEER.”
The incident resurfaced in my mind as I was reading about Facebook’s latest decision to introduce a reward system for translators. Obviously, the company must have thought these virtual peanuts to be extremely valuable for its dedicated users. Otherwise, it would have compensated them with something more tangible and may be even (gasp!) paid them.
Ever since Google (then the new kid on the block) got users to translate its interface into several dozen languages a decade or so ago, other web sites have followed suit by getting netizens to contribute free labour for the purposes of padding the companies’ bottom line. Incidentally, Google seems to have become especially adapt at using the intellectual property of others.
Admittedly, some translation technology experts, such as Jost Zetzsche, don’t think crowdsourcing commercial translation projects is problematic:
The Facebook management team thought it could create the “perfect” translation if its volunteer users translated it, making it just the way they wanted it, building the already strong relationship with Facebook into an even stronger one by giving them a sense of ownership (after all, they “created” their Spanish or German Facebooks through translation), and making them the best ambassadors imaginable for the site.
I am not convinced that Facebook was looking to create “the perfect translation” or bond with its users. Most probably, it was looking to “sell more Facebook” while keeping its costs down. By the way, if Facebook is so intent on cutting corners, I am sure it could crowdsource its legal, financial, and management projects to the thousands of lawyers, accountants, and managers using the platform.
Furthermore, any “sense of ownership” the users might have gotten was a mere illusion. After all, the concept of taking advantage of user-created content for commercial purposes lies at the very basis of Web 2.0, to the extent that Nicholas Carr has coined a new term – “digital sharecropping”:
MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.
To be certain, crowdsourcing has its place in making content available to disadvantaged population groups or when translating materials for non-profits. Commercial companies, on the other hand, should have the decency to remunerate users for such contributions.
Agree wholeheartedly. And my “donation” to Wikipedia is editing and polishing anytime I visit.
The term “digital sharecropping” is a very useful one. I agree wholeheartedly with the article and wonder who will be left to read anyone’s blog when everyone is busily clamouring for attention for what they have written for free…
When you are not paying for the commodity, you have no right to expect quality. Wikipedia, Facebook, Google and other similar web services (Is this a good term?) all offer their services for free. People use them for the content they provide, and if they find the content they are looking for, regardless of how well it is written they tend to be happy. At least this is the case with many people from my generation (under 30). I personally find myself perfectly content when I locate the solution I am looking for to help solve a computer problem, or information on an old television program, even if the site is small and the English was written by a native Russian speaker. If the information is not fully edited it does not seriously bother me so long as it is understandable.
In the Facebook example, the “translators” involved are also happy. They are being paid in coin that they value that raises their personal status in Facebook. Facebook may be making money off their labor, but it is unlikely that these people would charge for their services to begin with or could find people to pay them anything significant because they are not professional translators. This may lead to translations of lesser quality, but those of us who are bothered by it always have the opportunity to go in there and make corrections like Miriam does with Wikipedia.
@ Miriam – Thank you for reading. I am sure Wikipedia articles are that much more readable after you have worked on them.
@ Atar – I also loved the term. It is sad that some people feel so insecure that they are willing to work for digital reaffirmations of their worth.
@Yehoshua – My qualms are not with the quality of translation. You get what you pay for and Facebook has the right to choose to forgo quality if it so desires. However, I do feel that providing people with virtual rewards for goods and services with real life material value is manipulative (hence the clip of the beer ad). As to the “translators’” feeling happy about it, children slaving away at third world factories for meager wages are also happy to be able to put some food on the table, but does that excuse exploiting child labor?
Yehoshua – The term Web Services is already taken – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_service
As a professional I naturally prefer getting paid for my work, however there is nothing wrong with contributing something for free towards a good cause.
Wikipedia & facebook are both good causes, however the former is non-profit whilst the latter is a profitable (or on the way to be profitable) organization.
However we need to accept that the world is changing and some aspects of our job, and in many cases entire professions (for example non-digital typesetting) vanish into thin air as technology and society evolve.
I would have preferred being paid to translate the facebook interface, but I need to accept that this job simply did not exist, so nobody “took it away” from me.
BTW, no one forced the facebook “translators” to translate the interface so it is hardly the same as third world child labor.
Just because one side is making a financial profit and the other is not, does not necessarily lead to exploitation. Facebook is a social network, and paying people in coin that advances their social status is within the spirit of the network. If I perform a service for a friend in exchange for a favor, even though my friend stands to make money off of that service, is it exploitation? Also, In real life, people sometimes do work that does not provide them with any financial compensation in exchange for other benefits. Are unpaid interns being exploited? Are volunteers exploited? If the involved parties are not complaining should we complain for them?
@Jonathan – I don’t think that because we are professionals we are “entitled” to translate every last scrap of content on this planet. But I do think that the line should be drawn between commercial and non-profit projects.
@Yehoshua – Not every reward has to be monetary, but there has to be an exchange of tangible benefits. Social media status is not a tangible reward (and if people perceive it to be, we are in trouble). Social media sites are exploiting people’s insecurities and need for attention to make a financial profit much the same way as patriotic beer commercials manipulate viewers’ sense of national identity in order to sell more beer.
This is an ethical dilemma with implications on various levels and it deserves a separate blog post (which I’ll post to my other blog: http://www.ingathered.wordpress.com.)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by K Vashee, shioyama and Slava B, topsy_top20k. topsy_top20k said: Crowdsourcing = Digital Sharecropping Services http://bit.ly/4xwcGH [...]
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by leah_aharoni: Discussion on Crowdsourcing heats up – http://ow.ly/Plh3 #translation #xl8 #l10…
Renato Beninatto just recently made a Keynote Presentation entitled “The On-going Evolution of the Localization Business” at Localization and Translation Thailand and addressed this specific topic of crowdsourcing in the presentation.
Video of it at following link:
http://localizationandtranslation.com/PhotosAndVideos.aspx
All those involved in providing translation and localization services should watch that presentation.
@Jeff Thank you for the link.