| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語系口筆譯碩士班 === 105 === Crowdsourcing translation is an emerging working model that has gained in popularity in recent years due to the increase in demand for translation services. The benefits of crowdsourcing translation are that it can increase the speed of the process and perhaps save money if translators are volunteers. However, the unstable quality of the texts produced by volunteer translators is one of the main negative effects that has often been noted by professionals. This study aims to investigate the phenomena of crowdsourcing translation by examining the TED Translators. TED Translators offers an example to show how TED refines its crowdsourcing translation process in terms of a review mechanism and subtitling platform.
The research method is based on the Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) approach, as proposed by Toury (1995), and this is used to investigate the norms and phenomena in TED Talk subtitle translation. Guidelines established by TED and existing subtitling conventions are incorporated to investigate the collected TED Talk subtitle translations. The data for this study are collected from TED Talks available on TED.com, translated from English to Chinese, during May 2009 to February 2012, with each talk lasting 12 to 18 minutes.
The data analysis shows that TED Talk subtitle translations tend to show five characteristics, which are non-linear translation, lengthy subtitles, improper line breaks, inconsistent punctuation and extra notes, in comparison with conventional subtitle translation. These factors are due to the volunteer translators preserving detailed information, not conforming to the TED guidelines, and the platform lacking certain necessary functions. These characteristics should not be seen as errors comparing with conventional subtitling; however, their distinctive characteristics may consider a norm or phenomena that show volunteer translation’s unique nature. From the analysis of TED Talk subtitle translation and the working process of TED Translators carried out in this work, volunteer translators and subtitling platform are the key elements in contributing to the quality work of TED Talk subtitle translation.
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