Quality translation is not cheap. This is partially because there are numerous places where the market for it is not as efficient as it could be. However, it is mostly because it is <i>freaking hard</i>. (I do J->E technical translation for the day job on occasion. You need to have a superset of the knowledge base of an intermediate Java engineer to do it well. I got to rewrite a description of what a SQL injection attack was written by someone who had never used SQL, who faithfully translated a description they found in a well-known Japanese desk reference for engineers. They produced comprehensible English which was, well, wrong.)<p>Come to think of it, translation is a classic market for lemons, isn't it. The people who need it the most are the least capable of assessing the quality of the deliverables, which is why everyone here has heard of All Your Base Are Belong To Us. This results in both people paying absurd amounts of money for mediocre translation and, hmm, large companies thinking that their crowdsourced translation presents their company in the best possible light.<p>There's so many ways a crowdsourcing solution like this can go wrong. I wish I could show you a concrete example but I don't have any good examples of Japanese businesses that used the technique off the top of my head. If you guys want I can dredge up an example or two from Facebook or whatever, but I'm not quite as plugged into the Japanese Internet so I miss most of the inevitable snickering.
I love clueless product managers who have no idea about communities that they reach out to. This shit is not hard, folks.<p>If you are going to try to crowdsource something, you don't wave it in the face of the paid professionals. It's like asking the AIGA board if they'd like to do spec work on a redesign of MySpace.<p>If I was the PM, and I wanted to to take advantage of the fact that LinkedIn knows it has thousands of translators, I would have queried the pool to recommend <i>someone else</i> to translate. That's a process story that Facebook (or Twitter or whoever) can't match.
Welcome to the free market. If there are people that want to do this for free for LinkedIn and LinkedIn is happy with the translation they do, then why should anyone else care?<p>If you want to revolt against people working for free when they should be paid, come see what some of the "interns" in NYC have to do in journalism and fashion (and even more industries now there are no jobs out there)
It sounds like this is really exaggerating. LinkedIn accounts ain't cheap, and they do give you ways to contact other professionals. If you could ping someone and say "I'm interested in doing some translation; for an example of my work, check out the official Romanian version of LinkedIn," that would be great. Simply being able to say that you contributed to a site used by the person you're talking to is a great way to start a conversation that ends with them writing a check.
There is a way to get free labor, make people passionate about your service and your product and make it super easy. Google translator already does this, if I translate something from Hebrew to English and it doesn't come out right, I correct it.
A few days ago, there was a post on LinkedIn's blog that discussed the results of the survey: <a href="http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/06/19/nico-posner-translating-linkedin-into-many-languages/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/06/19/nico-posner-translating-...</a>