Crowdsourced Monolingual Translation

An enormous potential exists for solving certain classes of computational problems through rich collaboration among crowds of humans supported by computers. Solutions to these problems used to involve human professionals, who are expensive to hire or difficult to find. Despite significant advances, fully automatic systems still have much room for improvement. Recent research has involved recruiting large crowds of skilled humans (“crowdsourcing”), but crowdsourcing solutions are still restricted by the availability of those skilled human participants. With translation, for example, professional translators incur a high cost and are not always available; machine translation systems have been greatly improved recently but still can only provide passable translation; and crowdsourced translation is limited by the availability of bilingual humans. This article describes crowdsourced monolingual translation, where monolingual translation is translation performed by monolingual people. Crowdsourced monolingual translation is a collaborative form of translation performed by two crowds of people who speak the source or the target language, respectively, with machine translation as the mediating device. This article describes a general protocol to handle crowdsourced monolingual translation and analyzes three systems that implemented the protocol. These systems were studied in various settings and were found to supply significant improvement in quality over both machine translation and monolingual editing of machine translation output (“postediting”).