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Show HN: Simple translation by email

blog.unbabel.com

59 pointsvasco_26 comments

This is great, I'm particularly excited about the pricing. I was also wondering about the Crowd Translation Community. I do a lot of research that lands me in foreign texts. Often they are 100-200 years old & contain industry-specific terms.

I've always been wary of shelling out for a translation service, as I worry that the subject matter & age may make translation to English an expensive/arduous process. But, at a penny a word, I'd definitely be more willing to at least test the waters.

Being that I may momentarily have your attention, could you give an opinion on whether or not you think my use case would actually be successful? Again, with your pricing, I'm down to try it regardless, so I'm signing up, but I don't want to get my hopes up too high.

EDIT: Just so you are aware, I'm trying to add money to my account, but the confirmation email doesn't seem to be arriving. I've requested another, nothing. Maybe you are getting hammered by activity right now, but UX-wise I think forcing confirmation of the account should come BEFORE you enter your financial information, not after, as it leaves me babysitting it.

Really interesting use case. To be honest I don't know if it would work well, I don't think anyone has used for that purpose, but I would certainly love to try. If you are not satisfied, we can always return your money :)

Also, please check your spam / trash, etc. We have had cases of emails going to the wrong bin. In any case, if you shoot me an email @ vasco [at] unbabel [dot] com I would be happy to make sure that everything is running smoothly for you.

Awesome, thanks, Vasco, I look forward to trying it out this weekend when I have some time to go through old sources.

Also - just on the UX part, when I was able to confirm the account, my balance read as 0, I refreshed, still 0, so I went to top up again, added 5 Euro, on the confirmation screen it said my current balance was still 0, but then when I went into my dashboard it revealed I had a 10 Euro balance.

I don't at all mind, 5 or 10 are both fine for me, only mentioning in case that order of events is at all useful to you in debugging things.

Congrats on the launch, and good luck. I can't wait to use it :)

Cool! That's really simple.

How do you source translators? Does someone proof-read the translation? Basically, I'd like to know more about "Unbabel Crowd Translation community" :)

While I'd say this is perfect to support an app/consumer product, would you recommend it for a higher price SaaS product?

My guess would be that a translator receives the original text along with Google Translate's (or some other service's) version, and then proofreads it using the original as a reference.

You almost nailed it. It is pretty much like that but there is more than one person editing. It is a chain of editors that work in sequence.

right now we do facebook ads, post on job boards, try the usual things. We have some interesting ideas on how to tap to the bilingual community, which hopefully will do soon. So far our clients have been really happy with the results. I would love to know more about it. Shoot me an email @ vasco [at] unbabel [dot] com, I would love to discuss.

How is this $0.01 per word? That seems too good to be true. The website implies says it's human translators, but translation usually costs an order of magnitude more than that.

The only company I know who are doing massively different pricing is Duolingo, because of how the work, but Unbabel seems to be the same business model as traditional translations, with a much lower price.

We are combining a lot of technology with human work and we think we can make this so efficient that even if we charge this kind of prices we will be able to pay editors a decent amount per hour. We might need to raises prices, but right now it is your gain, take advantage of the prices while you can, if we raise the prices, we will grandfather current clients.

I really like the way unbabel works and got quite curious since it's a portuguese startup. But the way it works for translators is a bit weird. When you request a task there's no way of knowing if it's going to be a paid one or a free one. And in the end it feels like you're being fooled into working for free.

That is good point. We are in the process of refining the user experience and especially making that much more transparent. Initially we thought that having a stream of tasks would be more efficient. If we have paid tasks we always put that upfront.

This is really a good idea! It helps both end-users and translators. It helps building an open-market for an activity which is very important to global communication. I wonder if you will have this available for blog translation?

Certainly. Right now you can use the order form and get your blog translated, but soon we will have more seamless integrations. Ideas welcomed.

How would you say your service compares to Gengo.com? It seems you're a lot cheaper. Does that mean we could expect lower quality? What sort of QA do you have in place?

Gengo is catering to the professional translator. Each job is done by one person, with the possibility of review (costs extra). Unbabel is crowd translation, this means that multiple people work on the translation. Regarding QA, only the top unbabelers have access to paid tasks and to get there they need to have really good feedback from the community.

Depending on your content, Unbabel quality is quite good. Our hope is that it will be as good as Gengo.

In the future, we will be able to get something translated without anyone knowing what it is. How? I don't know.

Looks great. Right now I need Dutch and German translation so I hope they are coming soon.

Cool stuff. I think it's something that'd be useful to many people.

Thanks! We hope so too :)

I love it, so simple! Please add more languages.

Thank you, more languages should be coming soon.

so is the USP that translation is done via machine like google translate ?

USP? But yeah, first we do machine and then the crowd edits the output to fix any mistakes.

Brilliant!

Thanks! :)

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