Crowdsourcing at Adobe

Adobe has started a new process for translating (”localizing”) its software products into foreign languages. According to Francis Tsang, director of globalization at Adobe Systems Inc, “there is far too much content that needs translating”. Crowdsourcing is a term, coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe in Wired Magazine, to describe the involvement of a large number of people working on a task usually performed by a company’s employees or contractors. The concept is similar to the development of open source software where the premise is that a large group of people working on something they love can generate better results than paid employees.

Adobe is not looking to its early adopter users for a free lunch, but rather is inviting them into the process to discover which areas of their products are used most and which areas needed to be prioritized for localization.

The full interview with Tsang can be found at TAUS, the Translation Automation User Society.

For those not familiar with crowdsourcing, check Wiki.

Image from skegness.