

Tell HN: English isn't your native language? Get inside. - olalonde

I've just launched iRosetta ( http://www.irosetta.com/ ), a StackExchange powered Q&#38;A site for everything related to language. I'm struggling to get a few key early adopters and thought some hackers here might be interested as most of you are already familiar with the StackOverflow system.<p>In a nutshell, if you're not sure about a particular translation or have a question about grammar, just ask your question there. If you're a seasoned linguist, get involved and answer some questions!<p>PS: Suggestions on getting this community off the ground are welcome.
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olalonde
<http://www.irosetta.com/>

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nandemo
I'm not a StackOverflow user but I assume the askers and responders are almost
all professional developers.

Your site is bound to attract "amateurs" who are just learning languages for
disparate reasons. Nothing wrong with that, but a better analog to
StackOverflow would be a forum embedded in a website for professional
translators and the people who hire them. IIRC <http://proz.com> does have a
simple forum for that but it's not very good.

I'd volunteer to answer questions on Portuguese, but there are none right now.
I might check a few more times later. But that's just because I saw it here on
HN and would be glad to help you getting it off the ground. Otherwise I
wouldn't bother -- unless it was part of a professional translation site and
participation had a positive effect on my chance of getting translation jobs.

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olalonde
Thanks for your feedback. However, I'm not sure why this site would be more
likely to attract "amateurs" than StackOverflow. StackOverflow is not part of
a freelancer marketplace either (the career site was only added very recently)
and yet manages to get quality content. Thanks for your insight nonetheless, I
will consider integrating the Q&A part with a "marketplace" in a second phase.

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nandemo
OK, I didn't express myself well. Let me try again.

I didn't mean that StackOverflow is like it is because of the career site. I
don't know why it became successful. My main point is that people ask stuff
there because it actually helps them do their job. This means:

1) Vague, badly written questions and do-my-homework requests are frowned
upon. 2) It's a service that people would potentially pay for.

In contrast, on places like Yahoo Answers people ask all sorts of random
questions and get an accordingly wide range of answers.

It might be that regardless of the professional nature, programming provides a
higher barrier of entry than language study.

That's why I thought it would be good to market it to translators.

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olalonde
"programming provides a higher barrier of entry than language study". As a
professional programmer, I never really realized this but now that you mention
it, it totally makes sense. In that perspective, iRosetta is more likely to
attract "amateurs". I'll try to come up with a strategy to market it to pros
;)

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radu_floricica
Any chance to "subscribe" to a certain language? Not sure when somebody will
ask something about Romanian, but I'd like to be able to answer even if it's
after 6 month.

~~~
truebosko
It's a StackExchange site so just like any others, you can subscribe to a tag.
Since most people are kind enough to either tag their posts as the language,
you can do just that. E.g: <http://www.irosetta.com/feeds/tag/polish>

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mootothemax
There's a great website I use for getting my head around Polish (a neverending
headache-inducing joyful task), and it seems to cater for pretty much well any
language people are interested in:

<http://forum.wordreference.com/>

The forum interface sucks, and there's definitely a market for this kind of
thing with a decent UI like the SE stack.

Good luck, and maybe see you on iRosetta!

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olalonde
WordReference does have a ton of valuable content and a vibrant community but
as you mentioned, the user experience isn't that great. Thanks for the
encouragement ;)

~~~
mootothemax
The irritating thing is that it took me months to find WordReference, as it
seems like Google really struggles with decently indexing some language sites.
To be honest, I can only speak for Polish as it's the sole focus of my foreign
language studies, but it's been a nightmare to find more than a handful of
decent resources online.

If you want to bring more users to the site, I'm not sure if it'd be worth
experimenting with adwords. Throw, say, a few dollars a day at adverts that
target phrases like "Why does French..." or "How do I say in German" and so
on. It might bring enough users to give the site critical mass.

~~~
olalonde
I'll run a test campaign and see if it is effective. Thanks for the keyword
suggestions.

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hcho
Rosetta is a trademark and they might come after you if you managed to get
this off ground. Just a word of warning...

~~~
olalonde
That sucks but thanks for pointing out. I didn't know it was possible to
trademark an Ancient Egyptian artifact :( I'll try to see if I really am
infringing the trademark.

~~~
hcho
I wasn't aware that it was an Ancient Egyptian artifact. And the trademark was
actually Rosatta Stone as errnatX stated.

Nonetheless, if it reminds me another, possibly direct competitor of yours, it
can't be a good think, can it?

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Tichy
Might be better to separate by language? At first sight I was put off because
I saw Spanish and whatnot. Only by chance I also discovered a question about
English.

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enomar
You may want to consider playing with other color schemes. IMHO, the current
palette makes the site look a little dated.

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h0mee
hey there -- you've developed a really useful tool and I can see myself using
this in the future all the time for helping learn languages... BUT I really
think you need categorization by language for this to really take off.
Otherwise great concept and implementation, hope it takes off!

