
Tell HN: I made a freelance translation site in only 5 months - csytan
http://www.caterpi.com
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wlievens
Can I be both a Customer and a Translator? Using the same account balance? So,
can I translate stuff and then use that to pay for having my own text
translated? That would avoid going through PayPal and the fees involved.

~~~
csytan
I haven't added that feature yet, but will probably do so in the future.

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riffraff
it seems simple which is good, but it also seems way too simple. Some
suggestions

* I understand why you want to list A->B and B->A separately, but I'd say it should be the default that someone is able to translate both ways, so favour the common case and let users correct it later.

* Also, If I am fluent in N languages, I must list all the individual pairs, but it seems unlikely someone able to translate english to swedish and english to norwegian wont be able to do swedish to norwegian too. I'd say "list languages you can work with, then review pairs" is a better option.

What is there to guarantee the quality of the translation? I0've seen the
stars, but they only make sense after a translator has worked for a long time.
* Couldn't translators at least link/list previous works in the language pair?
* Could we have some kind of meta-moderation? Say, each translator from lang
x/y is randomly given a snippet of someone else's translation and can rate it.
* Couldn't we have preventive moderation? Request translation of a tiny text
for some non-profit org, say, two sentences of wikipedia, and submit it to
other translators for validation (or just check it's not google translate's
output)

I've seen abhorrent translations between niche languages (e.g. hungarian &
italian) because the customer has no way to tell if the translation is good,
and usually does not even have structure in place to _collect feedback about
it_.

This means there is not even the chance of going back post facto to take back
your money/improve your translation/give bad rating. In practice this
translates into a perfect market for lemons

Finally: technical writing is not marketing writing, nor literature, nor drama
and especially not legal speak, I believe listing categories in which you are
confident is much needed.

But all in all, I wish you the best luck and these are mostly minor nitpicks
:)

~~~
csytan
Regarding translating both ways, I disagree. Myself, I am pretty decent at
French --> English, but awful the other way around.

Your other points I totally agree with. At this point, I'm in the midst of
bootstrapping, so it'll be awhile before I can do some form of community
moderation. This will of course present some new problems to solve, so much
time will have to be spent thinking about the pros and cons :)

Thanks, I appreciate the feedback.

~~~
barry-cotter
I gotta agree with you on translation not being commutative. I'm at least
competent German->English, but doing the reverse brings me the pain.

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davidw
I've done professional translations, and in that environment, you _only_
translate from the "other" language to your native language, unless you are
well and truly bilingual, as in born, raised and educated in both languages.

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tigerthink
Hm, I'm inclined to think it would have taken me somewhat less time than that.
I made this site in about one month:

<http://deanza.campuseagle.com/books/>

Then again, Django is an awesome web framework, I copied someone else's
recaptcha integration, I worked my ass off, and the code is generally full of
hacks, such as discarding all but the longest keyword when a user searches.

But I'm not the fastest:

<http://r09.railsrumble.com/entries>

I could use a forum dedicated to programmer professional development. I'm not
interested in TopCoder because I'd rather work on my own projects, but I am
interested in discussions of how long other people take to finish things, what
the right place to be on the coding speed/code elegance continuum is for
various project sizes, how to make fewer stupid mistakes that cost you 5
minutes, etc. It seems possible that some of the supposed 10x productivity
differences in developers are due to trainable aptitudes, doesn't it?

~~~
csytan
Yours is a beautiful site, I'm impressed!

There's a few reasons why I think I took so long. Listed, in order of time
taken:

1\. Going off on many, _many_ tangents before buckling down and focusing on
the core product.

2\. Design. I'm a poor designer, and it took me about 7 iterations to get to
the version you see now.

3\. Fixing bugs. There's just so many of them.

4\. Learning about, and implementing custom localization on appengine (needed
because there are no filesystem writes for .mo/.po files)

5\. Working on it part time

~~~
tigerthink
"Yours is a beautiful site, I'm impressed!"

Thanks. Actually I did everything _but_ the design :-P

"1. Going off on many, many tangents before buckling down and focusing on the
core product."

Yeah, if I had counted those tangents it would have taken me longer too :-) It
took me a little over a month starting from scratch, but there were a few
weeks of learning before that.

"4. Learning about, and implementing custom localization on appengine (needed
because there are no filesystem writes for .mo/.po files)"

Nice. I actually initially built my site for App Engine, but I decided I
needed to have control over my IP address (Amazon's Product API, which I will
probably integrate with if I continue working on the site, throttles requests
by IP address.) So I went with Linode, which gives you your own IP and the
option of renting more for $1/month/IP.

I'll bet people would appreciate it if you open-sourced your app engine
localization solution, especially if no solutions are currently available.

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teej
Design: Clearly "inspired" by Basecamp. It's fine for proving the concept, but
will have to change once you've ganed some traction.

I'm not sure if the language dropdown is supposed to work. It doesn't work for
me on the iPhone. You shouldn't care about this at all, just a note.

The design polish is a huge plus. It looks nice all around, something I don't
often see with projects like this. I think it could use a touch of UI polish,
but it honestly doesn't matter at this phase.

Product: Seems OK. Your core issue is solving the chicken/egg problem. You
need to convince freelancers to join without jobs and you need to convince
people with jobs to join without translators. In that light, features like
forums seem like massive scope creep. Forums don't get you any closer to
getting traction. That should be your sole goal at this point.

Marketing: The value prop isn't super clear to me. You're not effectively
answering the question "Why do I need this?" and "Why do I need you, over the
other guy?"

Overall decent job. Keep up the hard work.

~~~
csytan
Yes, I have to admit the front page design is very inspired by the 37signals
website. I've been experimenting with adwords with no conversions, so I wanted
to try some other ideas. You're right though, I will absolutely be changing it
later :)

Thanks for the feedback

~~~
suckafree
I'd look at what JustAnswers.com is doing. They seem like a good fit in terms
of what you're trying to accomplish with building a marketplace for
translation.

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knuton
I love your logo!

a. “Orders” and “Jobs” both lead to only a sign-in form. I would expect some
short information and more explicit motivation for signing up there. Does it
make sense for the “Orders” item to even show up in the menu for unregistered
users?

b. I would expect the Gravatar hash images to be rather confusing for people
who do not know what Gravatar is.

~~~
csytan
Thanks! It was designed by kotan @99designs:
<http://99designs.com/people/kotan>

About the Orders and Jobs links.. I've been annoyed in the past with the UI
completely changing for some sites after logging in (especially the main
navigation buttons).

I'll have to think of something to put there :)

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csytan
I've been working on it as a side project for the past 5 months. Tell me what
you think!

~~~
alanthonyc
It looks pretty good right now. I remember your site coming up on here every
now and then, although I really don't remember much of how it looked before.

As of now, it looks clean, usable and has potential. Grats.

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barry-cotter
I signed up, which I think qualifies as a vote of confidence. How much action
are you getting? There don't seem to be any open jobs at the moment. How are
you going to grow your network? No one seems to have gotten any feedback yet.

It's a small thing, but on the language selection menu it'd be nice if I could
skip to a language by typing.

From the FAQ A: Your text is sent to a pool of translators, one of which
[/whom] may choose to accept the job.

~~~
csytan
The site was just launched two weeks ago. Mostly I've been working on fixing
bugs, recruiting translators, and experimenting with FB ads and adwords.

As a programmer, I never realized how much work is involved in marketing!

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braindead_in
Nice. We provide transcripts of phone calls to our customers. If someone asks
for translations I can surely refer.

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Goosey
Looks really useful. Question: What process do you use to ensure translation
quality? I noticed I can sign up as a translator without any barriers.. are
you only going to rely on feedback? What if someone gets angry that their
translation was poor?

~~~
csytan
For now, anyone can get either get a refund with a click of a button, or
repost the job to be worked on by another translator. Eventually, I'll be
adding some safety checks to see that it isn't being abused.

~~~
dualogy
The above commenter's question is _paramount_ if you're serious about taking
this somewhere.

Check out this German start-up: <http://www.tolingo.com> They have a bit of a
head start but never mind. Crucial about their service is that 2 people work
independently on each piece of customer copy.

How customers end up with one correct copy in the end, I have no idea, but
this is part of their pitch and this is what customers are concerned about.

Also, your About page is an FAQ, but you _need_ an 'About Us' page.

Great start -- not sure what about this took you 5 months -- now it's about
execution and continuous improvements ;)

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empire29
You should offer validation services ..

A wants Engish (E1) to French B translates Engish (E1) to French (F1) website
facilitates C translating French (F1) to English (E2) without seeing the
original English copy (E1).

It would essentially double the cost though .. hrm. Or maybe part of (F1)
would be translated back into English (E2) for validation. Hopefully is a
couple sentences are accurate the whole thing is?

I agree with other posters that the Buyer is at the mercy of the Translator.
Its like those people with Chinese tattoos that they thing mean "Love & Peace"
but they really mean "Supermarket"

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waxman
Cool site! I like the design. Clean and chic. I would maybe add a rollover or
a button-like image to the "Basic translation" and "Freelancer" div/links
because it's unclear that you can/should click those...

~~~
csytan
Done!

~~~
waxman
Awesome!

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basugasubaku
I like this idea, but the thing I would be most concerned about as a user is
translation quality.

You might look at these similar sites for ideas:

<https://www.onehourtranslation.com/> (they also offer an interesting free
tweet translation service)

<http://trans-aid.jp/> (seems to be all volunteer, Japanese-oriented)

~~~
mromaine
(full disclaimer - I work at myGengo) myGengo (<http://mygengo.com>) tests
translators and does quality-checking for multiple levels to ensure customers
are happy with the output. We also allow customers to rate translators and -
I'm trying to be honest here - we're almost embarrassed to show the feedback
comments because they sound too good
(<http://mygengo.com/talk/customers/testimonials>).

Customers also have the option to request changes / corrections, and even to
reject if they are not fully satisfied.

Anyways, just an alternative solution. The online-translation market gets
interesting by the day :)

~~~
jerryfist
I've used Tomedes for translation services (<http://www.tomedes.com>). Also,
was very satisfied with their quality. Just had a look at mygengo. I'll try it
soon

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ulugbek
Nice job! I used to be in translating business for a short while.

I would suggest that freelance translators are asked to enter their profile
information in all languages they translate to and from. Depending on initial
language a site user has chosen, profile information can be updated to that
language. That way a customer who speaks only one of the languages can
understand too.

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hristov
That looks pretty good. You should however add categories for areas of
expertise.

For example, technical and scientific translations usually fetch much higher
prices. Thus, translators with technical expertise are unlikely to use your
site and compete with the lower priced general purpose translators, unless
their special skills can be easily differentiated.

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revorad
This is awesome! I just added myself as an English->Hindi (and vice versa)
translator. Is the $0.05 per word rate standard in this kind of service? I
have no clue about it, so I just kept it at your default. Do you have any
customers yet?

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jackfoxy
There seem to be a lot of options for modern language translation, but it is
not uncommon to come across a Latin quote on the internet, and I have yet to
find a good easy to use Latin to English translation tool/site.

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d0m
first, 2 bad things: 1\. if you "add to cart" nothing, it does something
weird. 2\. I don't like the "in only 5 months".

then, a good things: 1\. Website is pretty clean, I like that.

~~~
csytan
Thanks, I'll fix that asap.

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bryanh
I really appreciate the minimalist design and layout. Too many folks clutter
up the UI (I'm just as guilty as any).

If I need any translation services, your site is bookmarked.

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alekst
How are you planning make many with it? As I get to know an email of a
translator, I don't need a mediator any more, do I?

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kyro
I was hoping you'd pick the other logo with the librarian looking caterpillar!
Anyway, site looks really clean and fresh.

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Qz
Tiny suggestion: make the entire blue and green boxes clickable as links, and
give them a bit of mouseover highlighting.

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milkshakes
cool!

i would love to see a feature (eventually) that allows you to easily hire a
"team" of translators to either collaborate on a translation or translate them
individually in parallel (you would have to work out the granularity here) and
rate each other's work. I'd love to have more than one opinion for critical /
tricky pieces.

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thinkbohemian
almost all the links at the top require sign-in. Also it I didn't realize that
the green div on the right was click-able and where I actually wanted to go.

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mromaine
Funny - why do you expose all emails on your site?

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robert_mygengo
Yeah - seems like a great resource for spammers :(

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joss82
I thought spam was dead (for power users at least).

Good spam filters killed it (gmail and co).

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robert_mygengo
Hmm. I have a feeling that any sysadmin out there would disagree that spam is
dead.

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suckafree
Good job. I like the space and your site brings real value to everyone coming
to the table.

URL is solid.

I know it's early on, but I'd like to see some examples or sample translations
somewhere. And when you can get some press and testimonials it will make the
site feel more trusted.

I'd also consider adding some type of image(s) on the homepage. It's missing a
human element and at the end of the day it will be someone translating this
stuff so I'd recommend adding translator user photos on the frontpage.

~~~
csytan
Good advice, thanks.

