In his excellent and appropriately timed Labor Day article, David Alan Grier outlines a taxonomy for the crowdsourcing industry.  In his taxonomy, he defines microtasking as "breaking a large project into tiny, well definable tasks for a crowd of workers to complete."  Since he saw fit to include Lingotek as one example of microtasking, it is worth discussing in some detail of how Lingotek uses microtasking to accomplish large translation projects and some of the benefits that come from doing so.

At the beginning of a translation project, Lingotek uses its software to automatically identify the segments in the document.  Each segment consists of a short sentence or phrase from a sentence.  The segments are then assigned to translators who use the results of previous translation projects, results of machine translation, and personal knowledge of the language to come to a conclusion about how the segment should be translated.

This workflow allows the translation project to be easily spread out over groups of a dozen or a thousand people.  Once translation work on a segment has been submitted, the community of translators is encouraged to review and vote on the accuracy of the translation.  The ability to have thousands of people doing small parts of an overall document allows translations to be completed very quickly since we aren't relying on a single source to do the work.

Microtasking of this sort has other potential benefits.  Large translation projects tend to come with big price tags in addition to the long timeframes for completion.  Relying on crowdsourcing to tackle a large project has the potential to offer significant cost savings since each translator is handling a very small part of the project. 

Another area where microtasking shines is in its ability to take advantage of gamification principles. In a  translation project, the small, discrete elements that each member of the crowd contributes toward the whole are a perfect fit for awarding points, badges, and listing the accomplishments of translators on a leader board.  Companies using microtasking to accomplish large goals collaboratively have an important opportunity available to them as their community grows, too.  It may be possible to create a network that is so invested in the gaming features of the community that they participate in future translation projects without compensation beyond those built into the game.  Not only could this lead to cost savings, but it would represent a level of customer engagement that any marketing manager would dearly love to have.

Of the four areas of Grier's taxonomy, microtasking represents the one which requires the most outside organization of crowd efforts.  Companies wishing to use microtasking to accomplish goals will need to rely on some custom-built method to ensure that there is not widespread duplication of efforts.  Where traditional project management, with its focus on small and medium-sized teams, may not be up to the task, software solutions are an ideal choice to help companies navigate the difficulties involved.