Crowd Sourcing translation is a bad idea for Pinterest

Pinterest, the latest addition to social media, is asking their viewers to translate their website and content by using a popular new online tool called “crowd sourcing” that gets people who visit the site to help translate it. But just like I did not recommend “machine” translations for your important documents which should include your website, I don’t recommend “crowd” sourcing the translation of your website either. Here’s why:

Poor Quality: again, asking a bilingual person to translate your website is like asking a Spanish (or in the case of my prior post, Russian) person to teach Spanish History just because this person speaks Spanish and lives in Spain, you can’t. It takes years of preparation to be able to teach Spanish history well and fully.

Lack of Consistency: crowd souring means many different people will be contributing to the translation of your website, and like with anything else, each person has his or her own style as well as their own choice of words when translating a word or phrase that has different options. The end result will be an inconsistent translation that will end up confusing the visitors to the translated site.

Lack of Control: crowd sourcing won’t let you have control of the message you want your website to create. Even though Pinterest’s content is user-generated, each user will lose control of his message, it will very likely be lost in translation.

Maybe Pinterest should consider using professional translators for the website itself and crowd sourcing for daily postings by users.

Funniest Translations: Coca-Cola

It’s probably safe to say that most of us are familiar with the ever popular Coca-Cola Company. Beginning in 1886 when a pharmacist, Dr. John S. Pemberton, created the flavored syrup. Dr. Pemberton’s partner and bookkeeper, Frank M. Robinson then created the name “Coca-Cola” along with designing the trademark and script font that is still used today.

Coco-Cola quickly gained popularity and in time, was being served all around the world. With being served in foreign countries, different translations of “Coca-Cola” were being used. It was first rendered as Ke-kou-ke-la meaning “bite the wax tadpole” or ”female horse stuffed with wax.” Unfortunately for Coca-Cola, this was not discovered until after thousands of signs were made. Coke then researched over 40,000 Chinese characters finding a close equivalent, ko-kou-ko-le, which is loosely translated into “happiness in the mouth.”

Coke needed to avoid using as many as 200 symbols used for “ko-ka-ko-la” due to their meanings, including all of the characters pronounced as “la”! Coca-Cola came to a compromise by using the character for lé, meaning joy. The translation of the name “Coca-Cola” finally settled on these characters:

This is translated into “to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice”- no wax tadpoles or female horses- and was officially registered as Coca-Cola’s Chinese trademark in 1928.