Every once in a while, you discover some optimization trick that just blows away everything you’ve done in the past in terms of cost and time savings. The tools you need are actually right there under your nose, but you just never put two and two together.
Native speaker translations is one of the most expensive things you can do if you have a lot of content. All the services that offer this usually look at 10cents per word, and for an average article with 500 words, the cost is $50. If I wanted to translate 200 articles, I’d be looking at $9.000 or more in cost.
How did I reduce my cost from $9000 to $46? No, I didn’t do it by brainstorming or by being clever – but by a chance discovery as I was reading the BBC news website: I found an article about the second life economy.
Second life is filled with people who want Linden Dollars. They come from all over the world, and for them it’s just a game. They will willingly spend 30 minutes to translate the article for you for 20cents, which is 50 Linden $. For that, they can get accessories, furniture, clothes etc. within the game.
For them it’s easy work that allows them get something from within the game. For me, it’s an insanely cheap native language translation to languages like french, italian, etc.
A chance discovery, a few days getting used to the game, and I saved myself $8950 bucks.
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Man, you have chanced upon what could become a *very* interesting economy.
I don’t think that it’s fair for people like me, working hard as a translator. Were those people really translators with a degree and stuff? Or simply native people… “cheap” things aren’t always the best…
Cheap things aren’t always the best…but often they are good enough.
Have 1 guy to translate it, then another to double check it. Cool.
How can this make sense? The Linden translators can spend 30m in the real world making 1$+ and change them into Linden money themselves. Why would they prefer to slave for your 2 cents?
Nir: I don’t know why – I guess these are people in “play mode”, they don’t see it as working.Cur: the people are just native speakers, not professionals. So the translations are not perfect, they are just native-speaker good.
@Currixan: one of the greatest parts of creative destruction is the times people like you get screwed by the competition
What other online communities could be used. How much would the mechanical turk cost?
@Nir: They are trading time for money. Lot of people without real jobs. They do have some cash because they are eating, living in a place, have a computer and can go online. But the extra cash they do have, they want to keep for more important uses.
That’s what I call smart use of Social networks.
@davidc: I don’t know the cost of translation from mechanical turk, but transcription costs around 40-75 cents a minute and is often cross checked with additional reviewers. So, translating entire articles for 20 cents is a downright steal.
Fascinating. How did you find out who was willing to translate? Would you post the link to the BBC article?
Slave/child labor comes to mind here. Really – think about it for a bit.
that’s smart !however it depends on ur purpose… cause this translation is not official nor certified so it can’t be accepted formally.anyways, thanks for sharing your idea
great. i wonder if this can be used a lot of times though. but awesome stuff.
Like it or not, this form of outsourcing is going to change the world.
Lmao retard, I doubt half the content was even correct.
How can you assure that the quality of the work meets the standards? For all you know, they copy-pasted in Google Translate and submitted it. Unless you actually speak the native languages, you’ll not be able to verify the work.But as a side-note, using Second Life as a virtual economy seems like an idea I might try out.
Verification is by proof reading everything from other people I know speak the language.
This story remember me of a Cory Doctorow’s comic. The first story to be precise. Cory go beyond and tell the tale of a couple of young girls that kill people on a medieval second life to put your deduction to an extreme conclusion. A pleasant and instructive reading, if you don’t know it is freely available for download.http://www.archive.org/details/CoryDoctorowsFuturisticTalesOfTheHereAndNow
Congratulations for discovering a guaranteed way back to the stone age and slavery. You should feel proud.I don’t know what you do for a living, but I hope these practices spread out to your sector as well, so you can discover for yourself the “wonderful” consequences of these actions.
Some of these comments are not fair.First off, you found people who were willing to do an activity for fun and profit (in their own way) and you saved money. It’s a classic win-win innovation and people want to see the downside of it because it obviously benefited you in an extreme way.As long as the articles didn’t turn out Google-translate crappy, I’d say you got a win. The people who did the translations for the Linden money probably saw that time spent as actually playing Second Life, as it was towards that goal (lets look at surveys and quizzes on Facebook for Farmville or what-have-you … although more dubious in that case).Finding people to do the same job (for fun?) and relatively just as well for significantly less is going to happen. I’m an American but I’d say the only reason we get mad about people doing it for less is because we want to keep our world-renowned standard of living.Very smart, followers++.
My take:Firstly, people are attracted to work environements that are fun. Translation tasks are readily available on Amazon Mechanical Turk, but Amazon’s work ‘environement’ feels like a nondescript cubicle compared to lively Second Life.Secondly, paying people in a unusual ‘currency’ scews their value-system. It is not hard to convert real money into Linden Dollars, but not everyone is making such conversion when desiding to perform a particular work item.Third, paying people in Linden Dollars bypasses the requirement of having a credit card. There is a ton of people who don’t have access to credit cards, PayPal account and other means of getting paid for their work online.
There’s a good chance he was basically using child labor (schoolkids tend to have a lot of time and not a lot of money and not a lot of chance to make a lot of it).
Hey, you know this is a scam, dont you? People make cheap translations for in world texts. I did a ton of them for scripters and groups inside SL and am very sad for seeing someone doing what you did. Shame on you.>Paula
or could simply pay a translation service like OneHourTranslation to do the job for you. It would cost you more than 50 bucks but you wouldn’t risk poor translatiosn made by google translate
Wow.. pretty interesting. How did you check whether the translations were just translations that people ran through google translate?Maybe you need to build some kind of check and balance system..
What Linden needs is to be sued for unfair competition and for damaging the translation market. Translators are professionals. We’re “expensive”? Gee, so are doctors and lawyers and plumbers. When your kid’s sick, do you want a pediatrician bought with “Linden dollars”? You need your Will done? A Linden Attorney will do that for 3 cents an hour so s/he can buy “stuff” online. This is truly disgusting, not to mention deeply, deeply disrespectful.
Actually, what you are bragging about here is how to fuck over professional translators. As others have said here: professional translation is not something that can be done by people on the street, be it a real street or a virtual one. What you get for your $46 is in no way comparable to what a pro translator would do. I don't even have to see the results; I know from experience that it is so.Although I can sympathize with your goal to get everything as cheaply as possible (it's human after all), this kind of »optimization« is actually incredibly, extremely destructive to these kinds of professions, and it will backfire to you in the long run. I'm not a translator myself, but I can feel what they feel when they read this.The other thing is: the quality of your translations will be incredibly bad. Most people »off the street« who claim to be able to translate will not even grasp the meaning of the source material correctly, let alone use the right words, the correct spelling and keep the same style. Translation is not trivial.If I was some guy on Second Life who is offered 50 cents for a translation, what would I do? Paste it into Google translate, maybe change some words around so it isn't too obvious, and that's that. 10 seconds of work. Would I take the time that it takes to really translate the material professionally? For 50 cents? Seriously? No way. I'm no idiot!Well… your non-English readers will notice all of this, immediately. It is their native language. Bad style, spelling errors and other signs of bad quality will tell them that you don't really care. This is not exactly an incentive for them to give you business. I know I wouldn't.
if those articles are to be stuck in some kind of spam farm, then he doesnt have to care about the quality.
Well good for you but I must say I suspect the work to be of poor standard as all they want to do is play, its probably worth the extra money to get it done professionally.
“Actually, what you are bragging about here is how to fuck over professional car washers! As others have said here: professional car washing is not something that can be done by people on the street, be it a real street or a virtual one. What you get for your $46 is in no way comparable to what a pro car washer would do. I don’t even have to see the results; I know from experience that it is so.”Sorry. The future is evolutionary, and if you can’t keep up, you die off. No one is FORCING these people to do it. That’s your difference between this and slavery. He doesn’t OWN these people.
As long as both the person paying for the work and the person receiving payment for the work both know what they are getting out of the arrangement I’m fine with it. I suspect that amateurs doing jobs for less than the going professional rate has been going on since the dawn of our species, and yet we’re still here. Kids even do this, every day, by doing yard work, babysitting, web design and programming, you name it. Adults do it when they help friends move or paint ( a pizza and some beer is less than the going rate for professionals). This kind of thing happens in every neighborhood in the world, and always has. Corporations do it on a massive scale when the labor rate is cheaper in other countries, and there is even a growing trend of some people taking advantage of lower rates for medical procedures in other countries.The only “new” wrinkle here is that big, bad internet is involved in one tiny piece of it, because he advertised on Second Life instead of on a local college bulletin board or newspaper, and suddenly a few people think this is going to destroy professional translation services. Hogwash. Even if this did become popular, there is a limited labor market on any social network, and a limited amount of work any individual playing will be willing to do before it feels like too much work. Plus, most of the projects that would use social networks labor market for projects are simply unable to pay for professional services, so there isn’t any real work being shifted from the professional to the amateur sector. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the end this actually creates more work for professional translators as well, when these businesses were able to afford professionals to come in and improve the old translations, or to make new ones.
Woah this is interesting. Trying out second life right now. I did a similar thing but for fun using the Amazon Turks. More for fun than profit, I got them to take pictures around the world. http://www.iconjelly.com Cheap marketing for me and some work/fun for someone less fortunate.
Did you try http://www.tomedes.com . They provide excellent translations for low costs. We were satisfied with their quality and rates here.
I know this post will really upset translators and people who do transcription for a living but man is this creative and an interesting way to go about it.
One more example that the world is populated by 90% of parasites feeding upon each other… Nothing new, and nothing smart about it.
The other half of the equation is that professional translators often turn out worthless crap. That’s been my personal experience, and the experience of my friends whose business requires many translations to English (they speak native-quality English but can’t do that job and their job at the same time). You’d laugh to see what the 100 euro-per-hour translation services deliver.
You paid too much. If your product is sold through distributors, they bare the translation expense, not you. It should have cost you nothing to get your content translated into any language you desire. It would be different if you actually had an office in that country and did not sell through distributors. Using other people’s money is the key. Money here means script or even barter. You paid too much.
If you do this a bit more cost and multiple passes, you could hypothetically create a crowdsourcing system that also filters the results for the best result. that is, have a group of people translate at whatever low rate they will do it for, then have another group vote for the best one.if you do this with a big enough sample, you could very likely surpass the pro translator since there is probably *someone* out there, who for that particular blurb will have a more eloquent translation than whatever particular pro you choose.
oh also another thing re: creative destruction and to address doubt that the crowdsourcing could surpass the quality of a pro.what something like this does is that it gets people who would not otherwise do a particular tasks to do that task. if you do this for enough people, you are almost likely to find someone better at it than the particular one person you are benchmarking against, unless that person really truly is the best in the world.for example: billions of people have never played basketball, but if every single one of those people played basketball, it’s nearly certain that one of them will be better than michael jordan was.
I think all the users in the game have done is go to Google Translate or Balefish and copy & paste the machine translation. As you can’t proof it you may have got some very bad translations but anyaway. It seems taht you don’t need quality work because you don’t want to pay for and if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. I don’t know what you do for a living but sometimes you may your self find outsourced to some cheaper instance.
Fair play to you for getting the work translated at a low cost. Most professional translation agencies would direct you to Mechanical Turk or a similar method of translation if you asked them to produce that volume of work for $46.Having said that I do not think you would go down that route if your companies sales or job depended on the accuracy of the translation.Would you fly with an airline whose engineers were using a manual translated using Google or some kid with half an hour to spare on SL?If the documents have no commercial or social value then you have probably translated them well enough for their purpose.P.S. If your job does depend on those documents being accurate then I would consider getting an independent reviewer from a professional agency to review at least a sample of the work.
Being portuguese I have a license degree in French and English and have been working as an independent translator for more than 20 years now. It’s not my main job but surely a significant part of my monthly income.I am also a Second Life resident since November 2006. In-world, I work for the best virtual translation agency: Babel.What I do ? I charge normal real life fees for normal real life translations. But in-world, I NEVER do a translation that is not related to a product or service which is exclusively available in the metaverse. And no, I don’t do any of my translations based on any mechanical translation device. I provide high quality work in both context… but have not tatooed “dumb” on my forehead. Thus, taking advantage of SL economy to pump your profits in your “enterprise” well – for me, that is exploitation, no matter if you came across some poor dudes who were just happy to get hold of half a dozen linden dollars (just FYI, a decent hair costs around 200 L$ so you see… you really are not one to whom I would like to work). I rather work with intelligent people, not with smartasses. Maybe someday someone will take advantage of your work as well…
Wow, that was a nice move! I’ll remember this trick next time I have something to translate and a small budget for it.