Human translation blackbox now has API
mygengo.com
mygengo.com
Sending translation jobs directly from the CRM (and getting it back in there with all formatting preserved) can save a lot of time and money for long-tail multilingual sites.
The pricing of mygengo looks very competitive, icanlocalize comes in at $0.07/word (value) and web-translations around $.025 (professional).
I'd say the distinction we have over other services is that we offer a completely transparent solution - all our translators are tested and rated to ensure they meet a consistent quality standard, so you don't have to pick and choose them as you do with others.
So you can literally treat us like a machine, which hasn't been true when I've tested those other services (I got bombarded with emails from translators asking me to pick them for my jobs, which really annoyed me).
We think that's pretty compelling for developers, and makes us a much more scalable solution :)
Edit: They have the solution for .po files: http://mygengo.com/string/about
It is better to offer translators easy access to electronic dictionaries from within the translation window.
Anything else I'm missing?
[I do occasional translations for Babylon, and have been pretty impressed by the company and the people behind it. But I'll probably sign up for myGengo too, and at least see how it compares]
When I wanted strings in my app to be translated, I included screenshots so that the translator would understand the context. Otherwise it might be impossible to guess what a very small string is supposed to represent.
For a while I was working as a manga translator, and in that case it would have been doubly important to see more context. Actually it probably wouldn't even work to split a translation task for multiple translators, since each might decide to translate something inconsistently. For example speaking style, naming of things etc.
This will probably work best for longer pieces of text like business text where you can easily guess the meaning without seeing any context and where you don't need to make decisions that might affect text that comes a hundred pages later.
This is a very interesting startup, if you want more gyoza distractions I'll be travelling in Tokyo until 3rd of May.
The context problem is a continual issue with translation - but most of the time our customers handle it by adding comments to jobs.
We do allow you to attach comments to the job call - so you can add context there and also links to related material if required. We're considering adding an option to attach files too.
You can also group jobs together if you want them to be handled by a single translator - this obviously takes longer but makes sense for all-in-one projects.