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Crowdsourcing and online collaborative translations have emerged in the last decade to the forefront of Translation Studies as one of the most dynamic and unpredictable phenomena that has attracted a growing number of researchers. The popularity of this set of varied translational processes holds the potential to reframe existing translation theories, redefine a number of tenets in the discipline, advance research in the so-called “technological turn” and impact public perceptions on translation. This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of these phenomena from a descriptive and critical perspective, delving into industry approaches and fostering inter and intra disciplinary connections between areas in which the impact is the greatest, such as cognitive translatology, translation technologies, quality and translation evaluation, sociological approaches, text-linguistic approaches, audiovisual translation or translation pedagogy. This book is of special interest to translation researchers, translation students, industry experts or anyone with an interest on how crowdsourcing and online collaborative translations relate to past, present and future research and theorizations in Translation Studies.

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The emergence of crowdsourcing has opened up novel ways to initiate, produce and deliver translations in our digitally connected world. New practices and processes brought up by these phenomena have undeniably impacted different collectives with an interest in translation, such as language service providers (LSPs), professionals, and Translation Studies (TS). It has also been argued that crowdsourcing can impact public perceptions of translation, rising ethical concerns, issues related to the visibility of translation, or whether everyone can potentially translate (McDonough-Dolmaya 2012). This paper analyzes its potential impact on the realm of professional translation, an issue raised several years ago by a European Union Commission publication (2012, 37–38). It critically analyzes whether the much-feared socioeconomic and socio-professional impact on working conditions of professionals is underway or not. It represents an attempt at charting the potential influence of crowdsourcing on the profession through a critical review of existing literature and industry publications.

For over two decades, the localization industry has striven to produce non-culture-specific texts that can be easily localized into most languages. Nevertheless, contrastive studies have shown that certain features of texts can vary between source and target cultures, such as textual structure or genre-specific terminology and phraseology. This study explores these two seemingly contradictory perspectives through a corpus analysis of original and localized Spanish web forms. Following a genre-based approach (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993; Gamero 2001), the main analysis concentrates on macrostructural differences and the formulation of conventional linguistic forms associated with rhetorical moves. Significant differences are found in the structural, pragmatic, lexical and syntactical configuration of localized texts as contrasted to online forms spontaneously produced in Spanish. The results shed some light on the question of whether texts can be fully internationalized during the development stages and on the inevitable effect of technological and cognitive constraints during the translation process.