

Unbabel (YC W14) Launches A Human-Edited Machine Translation Service - vasco_
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/23/unbabel-launches-a-human-edited-machine-translation-service-to-help-businesses-go-global-and-localize-customer-support/

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ernestipark
Being able to try it for free is pretty cool. I just took a snippet from a
foreign news article to try it out and the process was easy.

Have you thought at all about making a more B2C product? Obviously there's
less money there, but I often come across articles in Korean that I can read
but have a hard time understanding that I'd love translated (and not by Google
translate). I could imagine having a few bucks in my Unbabel account, and any
time I come across an article I really want to read, clicking a Chrome
extension/bookmarklet that sends the article to Unbabel and deducts my account
balance. Then I can just read at a later time. I guess this could be used for
B2B as well but not sure how useful it'd be in this context.

Also, any timeline for other languages?

edit: Just realized you have an API, maybe I'll build it :)

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gracaninja
Hello,

We thought about having such a widget, its on our roadmap. But not really sure
when we will do it. There are a lot of cool integrations we want to make.
Meanwhile if you decide to build it using the API let me know, I will super
happy to help you with the API.

Joao (I'm the CTO)

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gargarplex
The grammatical error on their infographic does not bode well for the quality
of their translations

[http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/screen-s...](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/screen-
shot-2014-03-23-at-2-48-44-pm.png)

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bertil
I can see two errors:

* “2. Its made into micro-tasks” that should read “2. It’s made into micro-tasks” Wouldn’t that mistake be so common and commonly decried on-line, it could be more excusable.

* Not sure what language is “Olá!” but if it’s Spanish it needs to be “¡Olá!”

Not sure about the over-all tone, either.

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jmngomes
"Olá" is "Hello" in portuguese, in Spanish it's "Hola"

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bertil
I am curious which part is translated automatically, and which is human-
edited: current translations algorithms have approximation of how likely the
outcome is, but I doubt it can translate to a quality metric that allows to
filter efficiently a translated text between proper and improper translation.
Maybe there are layers in the AmTurk treatment.

In the same vein, but further along: the Amazon Turk part of the service isn't
visible on the website. I’m assuming if one wants to make money, they would
have to connect to the Amazon service directly -- but then: why would
TechCrunch mention that this is the innovation? Same question: AmzTurk doesn’t
have great language coverage, will they need to develop their own to cover
Finnish and Polish? I wonder if a competitor can expect to extract
confidential information that way, or more simply disrupt a service.

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gracaninja
You can think about our process as a chain. A text is original machine
translated, then passed to an editor. When the editor is done we pass its
output to another editor. The process continues until we are confident the
quality is good.

We don't use Amazon Turk. We have our own community which works on our site or
on our mobile apps. This gives our editors a much better experience. We are
dedicated to improve our edition interface to simplify the work of the
editors.

João

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bertil
Thanks for that!

Out of curiosity: let’s say I’d like to join (I have free time, lack of
motivation to do something significant, and I speak four languages fluently)
how would I do that?

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gracaninja
Just go to our website and join as an editor www.unbabel.com/editor

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naugtur
The first startup I ever worked for was something similar. We connected
websites directly to a service that created automatic translations for
language versions within a minute from posting new content on the page, and
then it would schedule a machine-aided translation by an experienced
translator. Unfortunately, none of the translators nor computational
linguistics geeks knew how to sell it well.

I was able to dig up remains of our website
[http://web.archive.org/web/20100225094103/http://globalizato...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100225094103/http://globalizator.pl/page.php?\[en\]184)

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userbinator
This isn't mentioned in the description but do they feedback edited text into
the machine translator?

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gracaninja
Hi, I am Joao the CTO of Unbabel. That is definitely something that is on our
roadmap while we improve our mt systems. We have very useful data to build
better mt systems and hence improve the overall system.

