Crowdsourcing is a phenomenon that describes the outsourcing of jobs to a large, undefined crowd, first coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe in Wired magazine. Thanks to advances in technology and the arrival of Web 2.0, the social, interactive web, many crowdsourcing initiatives take place online, allowing companies to tap into the skills and expertise of large, virtual crowds. As defined by Minako O’Hagan in 2011, translation crowdsourcing is a translation model that reaches out to a large virtual crowd on the Internet to obtain translations. While some translation crowdsourcing projects remunerate their participants, the focus of this article will be on project participants who translate for free. Why do they participate and what motivates them?