As a professional translator have you ever received an email asking you to provide your translation services to some company or organization voluntarily or in more simple words for free? If you have then you don't need an explanation, that's what you call translation service through crowd sourcing.
Companies, firms, organizations and institutions explain their cause and aims that they are willing to achieve and ask the public at large to provide translation services voluntarily so as to be a part of their noble cause. One of the best examples is Facebook. Users have been rendering their services voluntarily to Facebook for many years. Now you can use Facebook in dozens of languages and all this hard work has been done without any cost incurred by Facebook Inc.
After witnessing this scenario on the horizon of translation services, many other companies have started wondering if they can why not us? Why can't we get such costly services from the crowd for free? The main reason is the motivation. Any sane person on this planet isn't going to put forward himself for the job until there is some big motivation. You cannot just send an email or a letter to the public and ask them to render their services voluntarily until and unless there is something big behind this.
Apart from any noble cause there is also a fact that what an individual is looking for. You may not believe but there will be a few who would be doing this just for a past time and for fun or for self esteem. And there are people who would be looking to make their resumes more impressive from experience point of view as they would be able to mention that they have provided their services to the "big name" organization or company.
An interesting fact is that if you are getting translating services through crowd sourcing it almost costs as much as it costs through professional translation. Because you cannot trust on the credibility of the services provided so you have to get the translation services proof read. Apart from this there are other costs as well. Then why crowd sourcing? Sargent says about Facebook: "Free was not the point, time was. Work that was appearing to take months got started to be finished in days."
So you cannot cut costs by getting services through crowd sourcing, it's just the time and other benefits that you can get if you are a reputed organization.
