Crowdsourcing translation

An interesting article from Wired looks at a company who are crowdsourcing translation to provide a better online translation service.

Ackuna uses a Facebook app and a pool of multilingual people along with a crowdsourcing model to provide accurate translation that will get more effective the more it’s used.

“The process works by breaking text down into segments,” explains Andrew Sylvester, Ackuna’s web developer, “determining what text is repeated, what’s already been translated, and what text still requires translation.

“If someone enters a phrase that’s already been translated properly — translated, reviewed, edited, or proofread by a real human translator, in other words — the machine translation step is skipped for that segment and the correct, human-translated segment is pulled from our ‘translation memory’ and re-inserted into the block of text.” (Source: Wired.co.uk)

Their service is currently focussed on individuals and small businesses who normally don’t have the need or bulk of work for translation companies.

Have you tried Ackuna? What do you think of it?