Quality of Interlingual Subtitles Created by Professional and Non-professional Translators: An Assessment of a Crowdsourced Translation Project

Abstract

Democratization of technology has set a stage for prosumers, who have started to take on an active role in online translation activities, and also has brought about the appearance of new practices and environments. This thesis, circling around the quality assessment of interlingual subtitles created by professional and non professional translators, aims to investigate a crowdsourced translation project as one of those new translation environments, where volunteer translators with distinctive backgrounds engage and collaborate in a participatory culture. In accordance with this aim, the TED Translators program was determined as the data source of the thesis and profiles of volunteer translators were reviewed to recognize professionals and non-professionals according to self-identification data. Conforming to the purposive sampling strategy, four professional and four non-professional volunteer translators that had translated TED-Ed Lessons were chosen at random. The interlingual subtitles translated into Turkish by the volunteers were evaluated following the framework of the FAR Model (2017), drawn by Jan Pedersen, and a mixed-methods quality assessment was conducted searching for an answer to the question of whether the quality of interlingual subtitles produced by different groups of translators for the same crowdsourced translation project shows disparities. The analysis, in which TED’s in-house translation guidelines were also employed to feed the FAR Model, additionally concentrated on the sufficiency of in-house guidelines to ensure a standard of quality between the translators. The results of the quality assessment present insightful perspectives on Audiovisual Translation training, translation competence, and online collaborative translation practices.