Show HN: Lang – Internationalize in under 10 minutes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Lang – Internationalize in under 10 minutes

langapi.co

20 pointspeterlzhou7 comments

Hi everyone! I'm Peter, co-founder of Lang.

The majority of the world isn’t English speaking, but most web apps are served only in English. This is because it’s difficult and time consuming to internationalize apps. We’ve built translation infrastructure that works out-of-the-box. With Lang, it’s easy to internationalize your site with human translators and instantly reach a global audience.

Our getting started guide is here: https://medium.com/@peterlzhou/lang-api-is-live-9a9c5273ef41 . We’ve been in a closed alpha with three SF-based companies for the last month and are excited to open up to a larger group of people! Talk to us at peter@langapi.co.

Shoutout to our team – Eric Yu, Abhi Sivaprasad, Klaire Tan, and Shreya Dixit!

Nice work guys!

How do you solve the context problem?

A lot of poorly translated software suffers from translations that obviously lack context. This is especially common with labels for UI elements like buttons and menu items.

A lot of AWS suffers from that -- for example, the AWS Lambda interface is translated so poorly to German in some places that I had to switch to English to understand what the options are supposed to do.

For example, there was a permission setting labelled "öffnen", (which is a verb and means "to open") when the correct translation would have been "öffentlich" (public).

Or in another case, the command "Exit" (as in leave the program) was translated as "Ausfahrt" (as in a highway exit).

Mistakes like that make it cery hard to use localized software. How do you suppose you can fix that?

Great question. Next week we're rolling out the ability to attach context to translation requests, which means sending descriptions and pictures of the requested translation to the translator. Would that solve the issue, or is there something else we could do to address this problem?

Your pricing page says "Upfront Pricing. Pay for what you need." and the basic plan ($149/month) on that page includes "Unlimited Human Translations".

Do those phrases mean that you don't charge a per-word fee for humans to translate your customers' strings?

You pay $149 a month for access to human translators with our tool. Human translations have a per-word-per-language cost, and we're proud to have partnered with Gengo (which did the translations for Facebook), who has pretty much the cheapest translations on the market.

We've updated the pricing page to be more upfront about this :)

"We've updated the pricing page to be more upfront about this :)"

I just reloaded the page, and don't see the updates. Those two phrases are still there, and there's no mention of per-word fees.

Some other feedback:

1. It's unclear whether your platform uses translation memory to ensure that people don't pay to translate the same thing twice. Consider calling that out on your pricing page.

2. How does your offer differ from those of Transifex and Startling?

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