Comparing Utopian Translation Rewards with Existing Services - Blockchain Business Intelligence

^Source

This was a spin-off from a previous analysis. Based on it, translations received the biggest rewards from @utopian-io with around $23 thousand in rewards when that analysis was done on December 15, 2017.

In this analysis, this author decided to expound from that idea, and look into the details of the rewards per language and then compare that with existing translation services and see whether rewards were below par, at par, or above it.

Outline

1. Scope of Analysis
2. Posts in Steemit
   1. Growth of Posts
   2. Language Distribution
   3. Growth of Languages
3. Translation Contributions in Utopian
   1. Role of Languages in Utopian
   2. Growth of Languages in Utopian
   3. Look into Utopian Translation Rewards
   4. Translation Rewards per Language
   5. Comparing Rewards with Existing Services
4. Conclusion
5. Special Notes, Thoughts

1. Scope of Analysis

• Contributions were acquired on Dec. 28, 2017 2151H UTC
• Data extracted was from 2017-09-28 1539H UTC to 2017-12-28 0836H UTC
• Down-votes were excluded
• Up-votes on comments were excluded

2. Posts in Steemit

Let's look at the posts on the STEEM blockchain.

2.1. Growth of Posts

Daily Steemit Statistics	Posts By Year-Month
Source

Based on the daily statistics from @arcange (left), the daily posts (blue line) on the STEEM blockchain was near 40 thousand.

On the right, it shows the number of posts per month starting from March 2016. Looking at the data point for December, there were nearly 800 thousand posts, the highest so far.

At the time this data was extracted, there were more than 5 million posts in total.

In these 5 million posts, how many languages were used?

Let's look at its distribution.

2.2. Language Distribution

Based on this visualization, there were 268 languages used. This is just 4% of the discovered 7099 languages¹.

English was the most used accounting to more than 3 million (84%) of the posts.

TRIVIA: Language detection is not included in the blockchain. It's a feature exclusive to SteemSQL. Here's an excerpt from this post of its author:
Language detection has been added to the Database Injector process.
Each time a post or comment is created, the body content is analyzed to determine which language(s) it contains.

Let's look at how languages grew over time.

2.3. Growth of Languages in Steemit

Steemit Post Growth	Language Growth (English and Top 10)

The left chart is from the 2.1. Growth of Posts. It serves as our reference as to how languages grew over time (right charts). The top-right shows the monthly posts of English and the bottom-right is the monthly posts of the top 10 languages.

The message is consistent in all three charts. It was on May 2017 that there was a sudden boom in the number of posts which continued until July. From 42 thousand on April, it tripled to 134 thousand in May, then tripled again to 380 thoussand in June, then peaked above 500 thousand in July.

Looking at the November and December data points, the community is also in a growth momentum.

What accounts for this growth in Steemit?

To understand, this author looked back at the history of posts by @steemitblog (official Steemit account) and it was during this time (April to June) that HF19 (Equality) was at work. Here's a brief timeline:

• March 30, 2017: HF17 + 18
• April 11, 2017: The 2017 Steem Growth Plan
• April 18, 2017: HF19 Proposal
• April 29, 2017: Consensus on HF19
• May 3, 2017: Sign-up Process Evolution
• May 24, 2017: Pre-release HF19
• June 20, 2017: Pre-Anouncement of HF19 release
• June 23, 2017: Announcement of HF19 Release

It was on June 20 that HF19 changes were reflected on the blockchain.

This basically confirmed what led to the growth of posts on July 2017. There were changes happening 3 months before the peak in July. The community in Steemit is experiencing that same growth now.

Going back to the analysis...

3. Translation Contributions in Utopian

This is the meat of this analysis - translations.

3.1. Role of Languages in Utopian

Different languages play an important role in any global economy. Utopian recognizes this as what's written in its signature (emphasis is this author's):

We are made of developers, system administrators, entrepreneurs, artists, content creators, thinkers. We embrace every nationality, mindset and belief.

There is unity in diversity. Languages play an important role in Utopian, particularly in translations. Let's see how translations grew in Utopian.

3.2. Growth of Translations in Utopian

As mentioned in the introduction, translations received more than $23 thousand rewards last December 15. Let's see its latest rewards as of December 28.

In just two weeks, it has nearly tripled its rewards to $68 thousand. In Utopian's voting history, it has received more than a quarter (28%) of the rewards.

Let's look inside these rewards.

3.3. A Look Into Translation Rewards

There were 48 languages used to translate open source projects. This is just 18% of the 268 languages used in Steemit.

Based on the table on the left, Turkish led all translations by receiving nearly $19 thousand rewards for its 691 contributions.

Let's look at the average translation reward per language.

3.4. Average Translation Rewards per Language

This is the full list of languages used in the translations with their corresponding contribution count, total rewards received, and average reward received (sorted by Ave. Reward from highest to lowest).

Swedish had the highest average reward with $69 while Slovak had the lowest with $7.

Let's compare each language's translation reward with an existing translation service for at least 500 words.

3.5. Comparing Rewards with Existing Services

Two sources were considered:

• Service 1
• Service 2

Service 2 offered higher rates per word. As such, this author decided to use the rates of Service 1 as baseline.

The image on the left shows all the languages used to translate in Utopian.

This is sorted based on the gap between the standard translation rate for 500 words and the average reward. The least rewarded (undervalued translation) is at the top, and the overvalued at the bottom.

There were languages that this author was not able to get on the translation service site used as reference such as West Flemish, Cebuano, Yoruba, and Armenian. As such, their difference was marked with a dash (-).

But based on this table, Swedish was overvalued by $4. The most undervalued was Slovak with -$48.

4. Conclusion

In this contribution, we've looked at the growth of the posts on the STEEM blockchain. As of date when the data was extracted, there were already 5 million posts.

In these 5 million posts, we also learned that there were 268 languages used. This is only a fraction of the world's languages.

We then looked into the role of languages in Utopian. These are mainly used in translations which has received more than a quarter of the rewards.

We've also looked into the average reward for each language and learned that in comparison with an existing professional translation service, rewards given to Swedish translations were overvalued by $4 and while most of the other languages were undervalued with Slovak being the most undervalued by $48.

5. Special Notes, Thoughts

Please take the comment undervalued and overvalued lightly. This analysis assumed that $1 STEEM is equivalent to $1 USD. With the current state of the market, STEEM rewards are actually bigger in value than what is displayed in the values above. This author just assumes that SBD will eventually go back to an equivalent of $1 and that the values gathered in this analysis will hold.

Also, this authors wants the reader to take note that the translation service used as reference offer their services at a professional level. We are lucky to have STEEM and Utopian who are rewarding us for our services even if we haven't or undergone the rigorous training that these professional translators have.

Tools Used

• SteemSQL by @arcange
• Node.js and npm to extract the data
• Power BI and Excel to generate the charts

Source Code

Codes used to extract data for this analysis are available in Github:
https://github.com/eastmaels/biutopian

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^{I am part of a Blockchain Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #BlockchainBI. If you have an analysis you would like carried out on Steemit or Blockchain data, please do contact me or any of the #BlockchainBI team and we will do our best to help you...}

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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