Crowdsourcing internationalization 5 Oct 2006

For the uninitiated, crowdsourcing is becoming the preferred shorthand for "customer-generated content" and is defined as "the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call."

Pixelsoup employed crowdsourcing to address customer demand for local translations of its Shopify.com content:

"One thing that was clear from the start was that we would never be able to successfully maintain multiple languages. Even though we have as many languages in the office as we have people, translation is a very specific talent and one that is a very daunting challenge for any business wanting to branch out internationally. While we were still looking for ideas on how to implement internationalization many of our current Shopify users kindly volunteered to translate text for us if we required. This got us onto a path that has led us to some late nights of coding and into our segue to introduce our secret weapon: Crowdsourcing."

As a result, Shopify now enables users to translate its content into their own languages and dialects.

This approach creates a win-win situation for everyone involved - customers get Shopify content in a format they can understand, while Shopify gets to reach a whole new group of customers that would otherwise have been inaccessible to them (all without shelling out thousands of dollars on internationalization). As you can imagine, it's proved extremely successful:

"The beauty of it all is that everyone has their own dialect, their own spin on language, their own flavour to their shop, and now they can even carry that through to the final checkout process. For a demonstration of this fact you need look no further than the languages submitted to us by people from all over the world. A few intrepid users stayed up all night to bring us German, Quebec French, French, Brazilian Portugese, and Swedish. By Sunday we had Spanish in three flavors (including Mexico-Informal!), Czech, Dutch and a note that Cornish was in the works. How cool is that?!"