
Show HN: Lang – Internationalize in under 10 minutes - peterlzhou
https://www.langapi.co
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peterlzhou
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](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!

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cyrieu
Nice work guys!

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jakobegger
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?

~~~
peterlzhou
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?

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rahimnathwani
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?

~~~
peterlzhou
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 :)

~~~
rahimnathwani
"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?

