Even though English is often considered to be a global language which the majority of the world speaks, it still hasn’t completely taken over the digital world. When it comes to sensitive subjects such as insurance, banking, legal or security, people still prefer to deal with them in their native language.
Is there still a need for translation and localization?
The Internet is a multilingual place where the content is adjusted in different languages to better fit local markets and to get more engagement from the community. If you want your website or product to be an effective and global means of communication, translating, and localizing, i.e. adapting the content to the target market and culture, is an essential part of the process.
Machine translation is one solution to the ever-growing translation needs, but it still has some shortcomings that a translator can easily overcome. And instead of having just one translator working on a task, imagine having two, or three, or twenty-three of them working together to create the best translation possible and come up with some awesome and creative ideas. This is how crowdsourcing came into existence.
What is crowdsourcing and why is it beneficial?
In terms of translations, crowdsourcing is a way of making content available to you as our users in your native language. It is a way of having the community, or the crowd – hence the name crowdsourcing – translate products and services that we are offering.
Crowdsourcing has many upsides to it, one of it being the possibility of engaging you in shaping the content of our products in your own language. With your knowledge of the local market, you can make invaluable contributions to adapting the content to specific needs of your country and culture.
Another benefit of crowdsourcing is that there are no limitations to the languages or dialects the source text can be translated into. With the help of crowdsourcing, we can create a large pool of translators translating in a great variety of languages. With many translators come many ideas and this is what separates crowdsourcing from the standard way of translating.
Now, you may wonder whether the quality of translations coming from non-professionals would be on a satisfactory level, but the sheer number of eyes looking at translations and the option to upvote or downvote existing translations is one of the measures that ensure a high standard in quality.
What is Avira Lingo 2.0?
Avira Lingo 2.0 is a platform for crowdsourcing translations which gives you the opportunity to translate Avira’s products into 100 languages. It all started in 2015 when we developed a prototype version to see whether a crowdsourcing initiative would be accepted by our users. Since it was so well-received, we decided to create an improved version with new features based on gamification models.
In today’s digital age, the threats we are faced with are numerous. With an increasing number of devices, especially smartphones, connected to the Internet, an excessive amount of personal information is available to be abused and exploited, and we are all exposed to different harmful activities such as identity thefts, cyber-bullying, phishing attempts and so on. That is why the importance of online security cannot be emphasized enough.
And while having security products in English might be a good start, it is not enough. We want to make all Avira’s products available to everyone in any desired language. Our aim is to protect the world.
But to do that, we need your help! Avira offers an extensive portfolio of free products which you can translate in your native language and make available to other speakers of that language.
If you like this idea, share it with your friends and ask them to help out. Remember, the more translating activity in a language, the faster this language will be ready to be released.
While translating in Lingo you have the chance to earn some cool achievements and badges and compete with your co-translators. The fun never ends! And the best part is – you can translate as much or as little as you want, whenever it is convenient for you.
If you are already an Avira user, you can simply log in with your MyAccount credentials.
Happy translating!