Why do you translate? Motivation to volunteer and TED translation

Abstract

Many organizations today mobilize vast volunteer translation efforts, but there is little research into how the volunteering of translation may be understood in sociological and psychological terms. This paper introduces translation scholars to some of the complexities of investigating volunteering and motivation, informed by research from sociology, behavioural economics and social psychology. It then makes a methodological contribution to the study of volunteer translation motivation by assessing the potential of qualitative analysis of translators' discourse to derive conceptually sound categories of motivation. This methodology is tested on a small set of statements from volunteer translators for TED. The test case prepares the ground for much-needed, larger-scale studies into volunteer translation motivations. The paper concludes by advocating a mixed-methods approach which can accommodate multidimensional perspectives and contexts of volunteering.

Keywords:

• volunteer translation
• crowdsourced translation
• altruism
• TED Open Translation Project
• Volunteer Functions Inventory (VFI)
• mixed-methods research

Note on contributor

Maeve Olohan is senior lecturer in translation studies at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester. She is author of Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies (2004), editor of Intercultural Faultlines: Research Models in Translation Studies I (2000) and co-editor of Text and Context: Essays on Translation and Interpreting in Honour of Ian Mason (2010) and a special issue of The Translator, 17, no. 2 (2011) on the translation of science.

Notes

1. The blog entries can be accessed at: blog.ted.com/2009/12/04/meet_masahiro_k/;blog.ted.com/2010/01/11/meet_krystian_a/;blog.ted.com/2009/12/18/meet_zoltan_ben/;blog.ted.com/2009/11/20/meet_anwar_dafa/;blog.ted.com/2010/02/26/meet_mayomo_ted/;blog.ted.com/2009/11/13/meet_shlomo_ada_1/;blog.ted.com/2010/05/13/meet_michele_gi/;blog.ted.com/2010/05/12/meet_tony_yet_t/;blog.ted.com/2010/05/11/meet_sebastian/;blog.ted.com/2010/05/17/meet_ayse_seda/;blog.ted.com/2010/05/20/meet_dimitra_pa/.