I have received this email:
Hi Peter,
We developed a crowdsourcing website for doing language translation that we are very excited about here at *******. Right now this is a free service for anyone who would like translation from or into any language or those languages limited to what people actually speak in the crowd. Our hope that [sic] this will become an invaluable tool for people all around the world. Translators help to translate text you submit.
Thank you for reading this message and I hope you will find this service useful or intriguing in our efforts to dismantle the language barrier. We like to think of it as StackOverflow for language translation.
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Best,[Name and address of an ‘Online Web Producer’ in New York]
Crowdsourcing means getting amateurs to do your work for free, or at least for very little. The problem is that you are likely to end up with this standard of language and proofreading. Apart from the dubious language of this mail there are four sentence breaks within paragraphs. Two have single spaces and two have double spacing. There is an argument in favour of double spacing sentences (known as English spacing) but it is hard to maintain, not to say archaic, in the days of justified texts. The Economist’s Johnson discusses it here.
But at least it is better than a previous email asking me to work for peanuts.
