Gatekeeping In Quality Management Of Crowdsourcing Translation Project

Since its proposal by American journalist Jeff Howe in 2006,the concept of crowdsourcing has been quickly combined to various industries in the world,thus bringing new industry competition and propelling a new round of industrial transformation with the help of Internet technology.In 2007,the famous social network website Facebook succeeded in mobilizing its bilingual users to voluntarily translate for the website,which brought the brand-new translation model of crowdsourcing translation into our vision.Crowdsourcing is viewed as the application of the open-source spirit outside the software area by Jeff Howe and socialized cooperation is essential for the open-source spirit.Crowdsourcing translation,a new translation model coming into being only a decade ago,makes the full use of various technology platforms in the web 2.0 era,and encourages collective intelligence by handing over professional work such as translation and proofreading to network volunteers.This new model has been widely valued and promoted in the industry in that it not only reduces the cost of the task contracter,but has greatly improved the timeliness of translation work.Quality lies in the very core of translation and the emphasis on the translation quality serves as the prerequisite for the continuous development of crowdsourcing translation model.Based on the existing research,this thesis analyzes the quality management in the stages of Pre-translation,Peri-translation and Post-translation in crowdsourcing translation project from the perspective of gatekeeping theory,and draws the following conclusions:1.In Pre-translation stage,the project manager as gatekeeper is concerned with analyzing the requirements of the project and selection of the volunteer translators.He is influenced by the readers’ expectation,social-cultural factors,project manager’s competence,translator’s competence,etc.The project manager as gatekeeper begins the Peri-translation stage with segmentation and distribution of source text to translators and controlling of the project’s development where project manager’ competence,translator’s competence and quality management procedures are involved.After receiving the translation tasks from the project manager,translators as gatekeepers begin to translate and later review or cross-review their drafts where translator’s competence,translation platform,large-scale collaboration and readers’ feedback are extensively and flexibly affected.In Post-translation stage,project manager examines the final draft,submits and evaluates the whole project process including the decision on whether the project needs an adaptive life cycle.Readers’ expectation and feedback,social-cultural factors,project manager’s competence and quality management procedures are throughout employed.2.In Pre-translation stage,the project manager acts as the gatekeeper,responsible for analyzing the project requirements,selecting appropriate translators among the volunteers.In Peri-translation stage,the project manager,the primary gatekeeper,is in charge of distributing manuscripts to the translators and controlling the development of the project.The translators act as gatekeepers during the translating and reviewing process.In Post-translation stage,the project manager acting as gatekeeper,is responsible for the submission,evaluation and conclusion of the translation project.3.Combined with the project management principle,the gatekeeping process of crowdsourcing translation projects is guided by both the macro and the micro models.To verify the above analysis,this paper first explores the feasibility of combining gatekeeping theory,project management and crowdsourcing translation,and conducts a case study in the Chinese to English translation project of Deep Learning in the field of computer technology,and analyzes the gatekeeping operation on quality management of crowdsourcing translation through empirical research.The study found that: the project managers and translators in crowdsourcing translation are the gatekeepers in different stage in the gatekeeping operation with various influential factors.This study highlights the importance of gatekeepers in crowdsourcing translation and analyzes the factors that influence their behaviors.It provides a new theoretical perspective for improving the quality of crowdsourcing translation.