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Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

nytimes.com

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Re: Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

#21

Post by vaksel »

sachinag wrote: post #4

I love clueless product managers who have no idea about communities that they reach out to. This shit is not hard, folks. If you are going to try to crowdsource something, you don't wave it in the face of the paid professionals. It's like asking the AIGA board if they'd like to do spec work on a redesign of MySpace. If I was the PM, and I wanted to to take advantage of the fact that LinkedIn knows it has thousands of…

only 300 people were enraged enough to join the group. That's pretty much the equivalent of a movie premiere being boycotted by a few dozen religious nutjobs.

You can't please everyone, and for every "enraged" person, who did the equivalent of signing an online petition, you have others who are glad to help and make your product better.

So you as a product manager, would choose to add $200-300K in expenses(for those professional translation services), just to appease a tiny percentage of users?

Out of those 300 people, how many do you think LinkedIn will lose as users? I'm thinking none. So in the end, they lost nothing, and saved a ton of money.

I didn't hear anyone bitching when facebook pretty much did the same thing...at least LinkedIn is offering some compensation.

Re: Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

#22

Post by kragen »

Vivtek wrote: post #17
byrneseyeview wrote: post #13

It sounds like this is really exaggerating. LinkedIn accounts ain't cheap, and they do give you ways to contact other professionals. If you could ping someone and say "I'm interested in doing some translation; for an example of my work, check out the official Romanian version of LinkedIn," that would be great. Simply being able to say that you contributed to a site used by the person you're talking to is a great way…

Speaking as a professional translator, I have to agree. But I'm also speaking as an open-source developer, so I'm used to that model, and the translation industry isn't. It sounds to me as though LinkedIn could have approached the matter with some tact, but it should be said that translators as a whole are pretty prickly. We have to be. The better we are, the less visible we become. And it's a common scam in the indu…

What would be a reasonable alternative to that kind of translation test? The first thing that came to my mind was critiquing somebody else's translation, but that has the same problem.
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