
Show HN: Simple translation by email - vasco_
http://blog.unbabel.com/post/77429798243/translationemail
======
emhart
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.

~~~
vasco_
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.

~~~
emhart
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 :)

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CookWithMe
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?

~~~
adambard
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.

~~~
vasco_
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.

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danpalmer
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.

~~~
vasco_
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.

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skimmas
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.

~~~
vasco_
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.

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luis_sarmento
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?

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

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loomio
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?

~~~
vasco_
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.

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

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

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

~~~
vasco_
Thanks! We hope so too :)

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

~~~
vasco_
Thank you, more languages should be coming soon.

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

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

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anilmujagic
Brilliant!

~~~
vasco_
Thanks! :)

