La collaboration en traduction (Crowdsourcing in Translation) : l’exemple d’un concours de traduction en ligne

Le « crowdsourcing », en traduction comme dans d’autres secteurs d’activité, est une réalité de plus en plus fréquente dont certains aspects, cependant, demeurent inexplorés. En vue de contribuer à combler cette lacune, le présent mémoire prend pour cas d’étude un concours de traduction en ligne organisé par un bureau de traduction de Moscou, en Russie. Plus spécifiquement, à partir d’une analyse de la structure et du fonctionnement de ce concours, nous tenterons de démontrer 1) en quoi ce concours représente bien un exemple de crowdsourcing ; 2) la validité de ce mode de production appliqué à la traduction. Notre cadre théorique se base sur les travaux de Daren Brabham, chercheur en nouveaux médias et relations publiques, qui s’est intéressé à la définition de la notion du crowdsourcing et sur le potentiel de cette forme de travail, ainsi que ceux du journaliste économique américain James Surowiecki, qui a proposé et défini le concept de la « foule sage ». Notre mémoire analyse les différents aspects de la collaboration massive en ligne, dont les motivations des participants, leur influence sur la structure organisationnelle du concours, ainsi que la façon dont les consommateurs-devenus-producteurs élaborent et appliquent leurs critères de sélection du meilleur produit final. Par cette étude, nous cherchons à montrer que, appliqué à la traduction, dans la mesure où il transforme les consommateurs en producteurs ou « prosommateurs » (prosumers), le crowdsourcing est une forme de collaboration à la fois créative et efficace.Crowdsourcing in translation, just like in other industries, is a frequent contemporary phenomenon; however, certain aspects of it remain unexplored. This thesis attemptsto fill that gap by examining the case study of an online translation contest, held by a Moscow- based translation agency. This study analyzes the structure and functioning of the contest in order to assess, firstly, whether this online translation contest does represent a case of crowdsourcing and, secondly, to what extent crowdsourcing is an efficient mode of production in translation. The theoretical framework is based on the work by Daren Brabham, a researcher in new media and public relations who developed a definition of crowdsourcing and studied the potential of this practice, and on the work by James Surowiecki, an American finance columnist who proposed and defined the concept of a “wise crowd.” The thesis analyzes various aspects of the translation context, such as the motivation of the participants, their influence on the organizational structure of the contest, and how these producers-turned-consumers formulate and apply their criteria in the selection of the best product. In our case study, we shall demonstrate that crowdsourcing in translation is a fruitful form of creative collaboration because it transforms consumers into producers thus forming a new class of agents – prosumers

Sense and reference on the web

This thesis builds a foundation for the philosophy of theWeb by examining the crucial question: What does a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) mean? Does it have a sense, and can it refer to things? A philosophical and historical introduction to the Web explains the primary purpose of theWeb as a universal information space for naming and accessing information via URIs. A terminology, based on distinctions in philosophy, is employed to define precisely what is meant by information, language, representation, and reference. These terms are then employed to create a foundational ontology and principles ofWeb architecture. From this perspective, the SemanticWeb is then viewed as the application of the principles of Web architecture to knowledge representation. However, the classical philosophical problems of sense and reference that have been the source of debate within the philosophy of language return. Three main positions are inspected: the logicist position, as exemplified by the descriptivist theory of reference and the first-generation SemanticWeb, the direct reference position, as exemplified by Putnamand Kripke’s causal theory of reference and the second-generation Linked Data initiative, and a Wittgensteinian position that views the Semantic Web as yet another public language. After identifying the public language position as the most promising, a solution of using people’s everyday use of search engines as relevance feedback is proposed as a Wittgensteinian way to determine sense of URIs. This solution is then evaluated on a sample of the Semantic Web discovered by via using queries from a hypertext search engine query log. The results are evaluated and the technique of using relevance feedback from hypertext Web searches to determine relevant Semantic Web URIs in response to user queries is shown to considerably improve baseline performance. Future work for the Web that follows from our argument and experiments is detailed, and outlines of a future philosophy of the Web laid out