5 ms·

Wonder if the author is aware of Amazon's Mechanical Turk and other crowdsourcing ventures.

by ssn 17y ago

bugs 17y ago
I would bet that this solution is much much cheaper considering the time needed for a person to translate an article and the cost of around 20 cents. One thing I do wonder about is the quality of the translations.
maxklein 17y ago
mturk does not work for translations. You get about 80% machine translated stuff.
- harpastum 17y ago
  Wouldn't you get the exact same situation with this Second Life scheme?
  - maxklein 17y ago
    No, it's different. In second life you meet with and talk with someone. You do a little mini-interview, and then typically you test one sample of his work (I have a native speaker friend for each of my languages). Then he does the work, we proof read it, then pay. mturk you put it out, people translate it (mostly machine), then you have to reject it, put it again, same thing happens. Etc. Quite different beasts.
    - eru 17y ago
      You can use qualifications in mturk. Maybe this could help?
- _delirium 17y ago
  For translations from non-Latin scripts to English, I've seen people put up PNGs on Mechanical Turk, which seems hard to game--- OCR is usually bad for non-Latin languages, and people who don't know the script usually can't even retype it well enough to put it into Google Translate. Might not work well for alphabets that are easy to learn (Greek, Cyrillic), but if you put up a PNG of Arabic, you probably aren't going to get many non-Arabic-speakers who can do anything with it.
- DenisM 17y ago
  I had that experience as well. It's a disaster.
- markerdmann 17y ago
  You may want to try CrowdFlower (disclaimer: I'm on the engineering team), which is a Dolores Labs project that connects users to several different crowdsourcing marketplaces, including Mechanical Turk. We offer a GUI for designing tasks and backend algorithms that automatically reject untrusted work.
- mromaine 17y ago
  If you're dissatisfied by machine translation, you might consider myGengo - http://mygengo.com http://mygengo.com - billed as "Mechanical Turk for Translations" - http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/11/mygengo-is-mechanical-turk-for-translations/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/11/mygengo-is-mechanical-t... (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder). Many translation services don't qualify their translators, often accepting them after a CV submission. At myGengo we qualify them through tests, and maintain quality control through regular spot-checks. We're based in Tokyo atm, so we're pretty good at Asian ⇄ European language pairs. You can check out an unsolicited 3rd-party review by a translator here: http://drane.it/2010/01/mygengo-fills-a-niche-and-does-what-it-says-on-the-tin/ http://drane.it/2010/01/mygengo-fills-a-niche-and-does-what-...

Wonder if the author is aware of Amazon's Mechanical Turk and other crowdsourcing ventures.

by ssn 17y ago

Wonder if the author is aware of Amazon's Mechanical Turk and other crowdsourcing ventures.

bugs 17y ago

I would bet that this solution is much much cheaper considering the time needed for a person to translate an article and the cost of around 20 cents. One thing I do wonder about is the quality of the translations.

maxklein 17y ago

mturk does not work for translations. You get about 80% machine translated stuff.

harpastum 17y ago
Wouldn't you get the exact same situation with this Second Life scheme?
- maxklein 17y ago
  No, it's different. In second life you meet with and talk with someone. You do a little mini-interview, and then typically you test one sample of his work (I have a native speaker friend for each of my languages). Then he does the work, we proof read it, then pay. mturk you put it out, people translate it (mostly machine), then you have to reject it, put it again, same thing happens. Etc. Quite different beasts.
  - eru 17y ago
    You can use qualifications in mturk. Maybe this could help?
_delirium 17y ago
For translations from non-Latin scripts to English, I've seen people put up PNGs on Mechanical Turk, which seems hard to game--- OCR is usually bad for non-Latin languages, and people who don't know the script usually can't even retype it well enough to put it into Google Translate. Might not work well for alphabets that are easy to learn (Greek, Cyrillic), but if you put up a PNG of Arabic, you probably aren't going to get many non-Arabic-speakers who can do anything with it.
DenisM 17y ago
I had that experience as well. It's a disaster.
markerdmann 17y ago
You may want to try CrowdFlower (disclaimer: I'm on the engineering team), which is a Dolores Labs project that connects users to several different crowdsourcing marketplaces, including Mechanical Turk. We offer a GUI for designing tasks and backend algorithms that automatically reject untrusted work.
mromaine 17y ago
If you're dissatisfied by machine translation, you might consider myGengo - http://mygengo.com http://mygengo.com - billed as "Mechanical Turk for Translations" - http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/11/mygengo-is-mechanical-turk-for-translations/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/11/mygengo-is-mechanical-t... (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder). Many translation services don't qualify their translators, often accepting them after a CV submission. At myGengo we qualify them through tests, and maintain quality control through regular spot-checks. We're based in Tokyo atm, so we're pretty good at Asian ⇄ European language pairs. You can check out an unsolicited 3rd-party review by a translator here: http://drane.it/2010/01/mygengo-fills-a-niche-and-does-what-it-says-on-the-tin/ http://drane.it/2010/01/mygengo-fills-a-niche-and-does-what-...