There’s a Standard for That: How Far Do TED’s Crowdsourced Arabic Subtitles Conform with the ISO Standard?

With the advent of Web 2.0, a world of untapped resources has been unveiled. Crowds of Internet users are no longer passive consumers waiting to be serviced: drawing power from various digital platforms, consumers—or, now, prosumers— can help themselves and produce content on their own terms. Many entities, whether commercial or non-profit, soon realized the crowds’ potential, creating business models to harness their collective intelligence. One such model, crowdsourcing, has made its mark on the growing market of translation. Crowdsourced translation, however, remains suspect in terms of the quality it generates. In this product-oriented, corpus-driven empirical study, I analyzed the crowdsourced subtitles to the animated poetry series There’s a Poem for That. The 2019 series is an original production of TED, one of the most visible proponents of crowdsourced translation since 2009. Using an integrated version of Pedersen’s (2017) FAR model, I found that the crowdsourced Arabic subtitles available for the 2019 TED series do not conform to standard number ISO/IEC 20071-23:2018 on the visual presentation of audio information (including captions and subtitles).