Today, Techcrunch featured Cucumis, a Paris-based free translation community. It is basically a platform for exchanging translations. To become a member, you have to know one or more foreign languages, and your translations will be rated by your peers. It is important to note that they do not sell translations, but merely act as a platform for exchanging services.

At first, I had mixed feelings. As a professional translator and a member of an association of professional translators, I should say something along the lines of how translators have an academic background for a reason and merely knowing a few languages does not make you a professional linguist. However, as a believer in all things Web 2.0, I cannot deny being intrigued by the idea. At the end of the day, it depends on the nature of your translation needs.

Traditionally, professional translators argue that amateur or voluntary translation services constitute an attempt on the respectability of the profession. Would you, my colleagues might ask, hire an amateur lawyer, doctor or programmer?

I believe that this line of thought is flawed: Almost every profession in the world has its stars, its regular professionals and its amateurs. People ask their friends for legal advice, they have their nephews design their websites, they have a couple of music students play at their wedding. Of course, this does not mean that there is no space for lawyers, professional web designers and developpers or musicians. The fact that most musicians that play at weddings are probably amateurs does not impact the relevance or respectability of, say, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Or the fact that that friend of yours is able to help you with your tax statements hopefully does not make you hire him to defend your interests in a court-case against, say, Microsoft.

I've had a look at some of the completed translations on Cucumis: A lot of them are excellent, most are acceptable, only very few are really bad and incomprehensible. I'd say that mostly, they are better than what you get from a lot of localization agencies, including some well-known giants. After all, this is not voluntary work or amateur work, strictly speaking, in that by trading their services with each other, members do get something in return, and I suspect a lot of them are full-time professionals.

However, there are some caveats. I have seen translation requests that involve health and safety instructions. People can get sued because of mistranslations in that domain – who is accountable in this case? Cucumis? The individual translator? Have they got insurance? Another caveat is non-disclosure.

Michael Arrington asks why they do not monetize their platform by selling translations. I suspect there are a few reasons. Firstly, the above mentioned issue of accountability. Secondly, this would attract a lot of those useless translators who currently advertise their services on sites such as getafreelancer or on Amazon's mechanical turk (useless in that you would get better quality from machine translation). Quality would suffer as a result, or they would need an army of administrators. Thirdly, it would certainly have an impact on the community.

I would see an alternative way to monetize this. Since the translations are publicly available and some of them are really good, this would be the perfect “hunting ground” for recruitment. Also, the rating system provides an important added value. This means, instead of selling to direct clients, I would advertise this as a place to find good translators within the industry, i.e. compete with proz.com, goTranslators or aquarius where it is usually quite difficult and time-consuming to separate the chaff from the wheat.

I cannot stress enough that I consider the rating system to be their biggest asset and that's what they should build on when trying to monetize it.

In any case, I wish Cucumis the best of luck.

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Categories: Language and Translation Localization and Internationalization

Keywords/tags: cucumis translation social network localization

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