The Rosetta Foundation is currently developing innovative technology solutions for our community translation platform. Last April, we invited volunteers who had completed at least one project for The Rosetta Foundation to participate in a technology survey. The main purpose of the survey was to get volunteers’ feedback on what they think are important features to make a community translation platform easy, effective and enjoyable to use.

There were 39 features listed in the survey under five different categories, and most of these were drawn from feedback gathered at The Rosetta Foundation Design Fest and the TAUS Roundtable on Collaborative Translation, two separate workshops that took place in 2011.

Volunteer Recognition Features

Volunteer recognition features constituted the most important category to collect feedback for, as this will allow us to implement features for recognizing the work of our volunteers in a way that is most meaningful to them. The ‘right to showcase translations to potential employers’ was the clear winner in this category, with 91% of respondents rating this feature as either ‘very important’ or ‘important’. The runner-up with 78% was ‘the opportunity to be promoted to reviewer and team leader roles based on performance’ and ‘an official certificate’ came in third place came with 66%.

Figure 1: Survey Question 1

Top 10 Features List

Here is a list of the ten features that ranked highest based on the average rating of the 39 featuresproposed by the designers, irrespective of category:

1. Access to open linguistic resources (term bases, TMs)
2. Community query forum
3. In-context translation
4. Personalized view of available tasks list (sort by language, domain, NGO etc.)
5. Technical support
6. Right to showcase translations to potential employers
7. Training on tools and processes
8. Task self-selection
9. Direct communication among volunteers: Forum, anonymous email, chat
10. Opportunity to be promoted to reviewer and team-leader roles based on performance (volunteer career path)

Finally, we would like to thank all the volunteers who participated in the survey; your feedback is very important for the development of our community translation platform.

Please click here to see the complete survey report.

If you would like to complete the survey, please click here.

Elaine O’Curran