Zooniverse is the world’s largest platform for online, crowdsourced research. We provide a space for research teams to build and run projects that invite volunteers to help process data to aid in their research efforts. The general ethos of Zooniverse is that you don’t have to be a subject matter expert to take part—anyone can contribute to real research. Since the platform launched in 2009, over 2.6 million registered volunteers from 200+ countries have collectively produced hundreds of millions of classifications across 300+ projects.
According to a 2021 participant survey (Jackson et al. 2022), most Zooniverse volunteers are based in either the United States (40%) or the United Kingdom (25%). The majority of survey respondents identified as residents of the Global North, with the highest representation from the Global South from India (2%). The remaining 25% of survey respondents were located in over 200 countries.
The majority representation of volunteers from the US and UK is in line with the fact that most Zooniverse research teams are based in the US and UK, as are the Zooniverse team (our core development and leadership teams are based at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Oxford University, and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities). The location demographics in the 2021 survey results are consistent with the last major volunteer survey, carried out in 2014 (Simpson et al. 2014).
Teams create Zooniverse projects via the Project Builder, a browser-based tool that lets anyone create a crowdsourcing project, free of charge. The ability to translate a project is currently available via the Project Builder user interface (UI). The majority of projects using the translations feature only add one non-English translation, though some project teams choose to translate their project into many languages in order to provide support for multilingual volunteer communities, and/or reflect multilingual datasets. The size of the volunteer community can also be a motivating factor, as well as staff time and resources.
Lack of translation in digital spaces is often a reflection of team demographics, as well as what Nilsson-Fernàndez and Dombrowski (2022) refer to as the "monolingual-Anglophone obliviousness with regard to language." The motivation to translate a crowdsourcing project can be a reflection of the dataset and/or the geographic location of the project team. Translation can be led by the research team leading the project, or it can be a community-led initiative by current project volunteers or potential volunteers who are unable to participate due to language barriers.
Horvath (2021) suggests that "raising awareness of the peculiarities and challenges that those dealing with non-English texts and non-Latin scripts in a digital context regularly face is key to the development of this area." Our motivation for sharing this work is not only an effort to raise awareness of the availability of this feature, but also to solicit feedback from the broader Digital Humanities (DH) community and hold ourselves accountable to increasing support for translations in the coming years.