@inproceedings{35d3398bdd6b46759de155f9df163609,
title = "Before knowledge management: Quality expectations in volunteer translation",
abstract = "Translation Commons (www.trommons.org) is an online open-source platform maintained by The Rosetta Foundation, which matches non-profit translation projects with language volunteers across the world. It has so far attracted more than 7500 translation volunteers and 180 organisations. The volunteers on Trommons as a group are relatively homogeneous in terms of their high level of education and translation-relevant training and therefore share codified knowledge on translation relevant topics. However, a number of challenges to knowledge management can be observed. The current structure and usage of the platform results in distributed volunteers working in relative isolation from each other, with only a minimal, project-specific exchange of information. In contrast to this, there is a need for a shared understanding of quality expectations and processes to implement those expectations based on the assumption that the challenges the localisation industry as a whole faces in defining and describing quality are also difficulties the Trommons community deals with. In this paper, we address the questions: To what extent does the Trommons community have a shared understanding of localisation quality? To what extent does the Trommons community have a shared terminology to describe localisation quality? We investigate answers to these questions by analysing evaluation comments provided by reviewers to translators. We then categorize these evaluation comments into quality aspects described in the QT Launchpad Multidimensional Quality Metrics (http://www.qt21.eu/launchpad/content/multidimensional-quality-metrics) for further quantitative analysis. The results of this analysis show that the Trommons community focuses especially on highly codified aspects of quality such as spelling and grammar, and faces similar challenges in describing less codified aspects as the translation and localisation industry. This suggests the need for further improvement on knowledge sharing and consensus in these areas. The understanding of consensus and tacit vs. codified knowledge gained from this research provides important implications for developing social or crowdsourcing projects and facilitating knowledge sharing and consensus decision making efforts in these areas.",
keywords = "Distributed community, Not-for-profit, Quality expectations, Social localisation, Tacit knowledge, Volunteer translation",
author = "{De Wille}, Tabea and Chris Exton and Reinhard Sch{\"a}ler",
year = "2015",
language = "English",
isbn = "9781910810460",
series = "Proceedings of the European Conference on Knowledge Management, ECKM",
publisher = "Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited",
pages = "920--928",
editor = "Maurizzio Massaro and Andrea Garlatti",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Knowledge Management, ECKM 2015",
note = "Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Knowledge Management, ECKM 2015 ; Conference date: 03-09-2015 Through 04-09-2015",
}