- 期刊
Motivational Design in Translation Crowdsourcing: A Gamification Approach to Facebook Community Translation
眾包翻譯之激勵性設計：從遊戲化角度探討臉書社群翻譯
摘要
Translation crowdsourcing, an online participatory practice emerging in the Web 2.0 era, has been widely adopted by both for-profit and non-profit organizations to expand their global reach and achieve their commercial or humanitarian goals. The key to successful translation crowdsourcing lies in the ability to motivate volunteer translators. Previous studies have made a detailed inquiry into this motivational issue, mainly from the standpoint of the translators themselves. In order to offer complementary views on motivation, this paper takes Facebook community translation as the subject of a theoretical case study, and explores its motivational design based on insights drawn from gamification research. The analysis reveals that apart from having some game-like elements as its main components, Facebook's translation application also contains a three-part motivational design-consisting of motivational considerations, simplification devices and triggers-to accompany these primary components. Such an arrangement fulfills the requirements of an effective gamified system, and in principle can assist Facebook in meeting the diverse motivational needs of its user-translators and keeping them engaged. The effects of this motivational design, however, may be diminished in actual practice by (1) Facebook's inattentive and non-responsive attitude, (2) the lack of sufficient contextual information for the translation of the segments, and (3) the constrained visibility of the feedback mechanisms. In addition, some ethical problems may also arise here, such as jeopardizing the user-translators' autonomy and obscuring Facebook's commercial purposes. To maximize the effectiveness of this motivational design in an ethical way, Facebook should take into careful consideration these influencing factors and ethical issues.
並列摘要
眾包翻譯是Web 2.0世代中興起之線上參與式翻譯活動。今日無論營利或非營利機構皆已廣泛使用眾包翻譯，以擴展國際觸角並達成商業或人道主義目標。眾包翻譯順利推行的關鍵在於激勵志願譯者之翻譯動機並維持其熱忱。先前研究雖已針對此激勵動機做過詳細探討，然僅從譯者角度出發。為深入以往未觸及之觀點，本文以臉書社群翻譯為個案，並採用遊戲化概念作為分析架構，從理論層面對此社群翻譯之激勵性設計做一剖析。分析結果顯示，臉書社群翻譯應用程式除了含括與遊戲成分類似的組成要素之外，亦蘊含一個三層面的激勵性設計（亦即動機考量、簡單化措施與觸發物）以強化組成要素的功能。臉書翻譯應用程式的設計符合有成效之遊戲化體制的條件，因而就理論層面而言，可協助臉書滿足其譯者的多樣化動機，並使譯者持續投入。然而實際運作時，此激勵性設計的成效則可能受以下因素之影響而削弱：（1）臉書的漠視態度或不回應之作法、（2）翻譯相關情境資訊之不足、（3）回饋機制之能見度受限。此外，亦可能引發相關道德爭議，例如阻礙臉書譯者的自主性與掩飾臉書的商業目的。為能充分發揮此激勵性設計之成效，並避免衍生道德議題，臉書應審慎關注上述影響因素並體現道德關照。