Volunteers and public service translation

Community translation, also called public service translation, generally implies a professional, quality-controlled service for linguistic groups with limited access to the mainstream language(s). It gained recognition as a specific field some decades ago, as part of access and equity policies in advanced democracies seeking to address the needs of newly arriving immigrants. However, a quick web search shows that ‘community translation’ has recently acquired another meaning: the translation of any type of content by volunteer bilinguals, with an emphasis not on for, but on by the community. In this emerging modern sense, it denotes a web-based (crowdsourced, collaborative, user-generated, wiki, etc.) phenomenon, whereby volunteer bilinguals translate any content type via social media: amateur translation by the community. To draw the necessary distinction, some authors (most notably O’Hagan, 2011) have coined the term community translation 2.0. This chapter will follow the same convention, as the 2.0 tag conveniently alludes both to the supporting technological platform (web 2.0) and its broader embedded concept of social media. Community/public service translation and community translation 2.0 would appear to have little in common. Apart from a passing mention by Lesch (2014) and Taibi and Ozolins (2016), no other author has so far felt the need to unite both concepts. Certainly, social media’s impact on professional activities has been the focus of thousands of studies since Locke et al. wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto in 2000; however, little attention has been paid to how the social media subset of community translation 2.0 impacts on traditional public service translation, hitherto the preserve of professionals. This chapter attempts to fill that gap by identifying the resultant landscape if both translation concepts (for and by the community) were to intersect, in the hope that such understanding could help maximise the efficient deployment of perpetually scarce community/public service translation resources. Although mass amateurisation suggests de-skilling and demonetarisation, it need not be wholly negative on professional translators: the entry of bilinguals and social media interaction could also benefit experts in an enhanced role as promoters of standards, trainers/mentors of volunteers and shapers of social perceptions about translation. Such increased influence could conceivably ripple- through into the long tail languages, thus far largely inaccessible to public service translation and professionalisation.