Crowdsourcing, crowdsourced translation and translation studies:An empirical study on its applications in Turkey

Crowdsourcing has attracted increasing attention in recent years and similarly, crowdsourcing translation has become one of the most important translation activities, particularly in the 21st century. Numerous studies on this phenomenon around the world have focused on different aspects of it and tried to shed light on the subject. The fact that the very limited number of studies on the phenomenon in Turkey have dealt with the subject with a very narrow scope has made it necessary to examine the subject more comprehensively. From this perspective, this study focuses on evaluating the approaches to the phenomenon in Turkey, identifying its application areas and revealing the general awareness on the subject. In this context, a national and international literature review was made, a survey was conducted to measure the general situation, a series of interviews were carried out with participants from academia, industry and participants of crowdsourcing translation activities, and the data obtained from the interviews were used to determine the relevant criteria within the scope of the analytical hierarchy process and weight scaling was performed. In addition, crowdsourced translation work was simulated with the participation of students in translation-related departments of four universities to make a practical evaluation of the subject. The results of the analyses show that crowdsourced translation activity in Turkey is mainly carried out not by national organizations and businesses, but by top-down processes from international institutions and organizations, and that the practices outside of these are mostly driven by 'personal interests and hobbies' such as fan subtitling, scanlation, video game rom hacking within the scope of bottom-up processes, and that the translation participants are both translators and users of the translated text. In this context, the need to redefine roles has emerged. It has been understood that there is a very limited level of awareness on the subject and that crowdsourced translation, which is a 'volunteer' based practice, is predominantly dominated by an understanding that crowdsourcing is only free of charge. In addition, it was found that the efforts to professionalize the process demotivated 'amateur' participants and reduced the level of participation.