Crowdsourcing e Cloud-computing: una nuova generazione di risorse e tecnologie per la traduzione

Machine Translation, integrated into translation web sites, information retrieval engines, instant messaging applications, is currently used by a large audience of Internet users for different purposes (information, dissemination, real-time access to information in foreign languages, among others). Relevant changes are taking place under emerging phenomena of the Web such as crowdsourcing, i.e. the exploitation of a community/group of people to perform tasks normally performed by employees and the availability of translation tools based on cloud computing technologies, which enable ubiquitous access to digital content and online multilingual translation tools. In particular, collaborative translation platforms, in which professional or occasional translators interact and use state-of-the-art translation technologies originate from the combination of crowdsourcing and cloud models of automatic/assisted translation. This paper will analyze the impact of these new collaborative translation technologies on the translation process and the working practices of translators, highlighting the possible effects in the field of translation teaching.