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Tell HN: I made a freelance translation site in only 5 months

caterpi.com

21–30 of 56 posts

Re: Tell HN: I made a freelance translation site in only 5 months

#21
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 :)

Re: Tell HN: I made a freelance translation site in only 5 months

#22

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…

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.

Re: Tell HN: I made a freelance translation site in only 5 months

#24
post #22

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…

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 trick could be to change the interface: from [combo] to [combo] (and viceversa [check box])

This way you can keep your preferred default of only one direction but allow adding the other more easily.

Re: Tell HN: I made a freelance translation site in only 5 months

#26
post #20

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)

That's a big concern of mine. Since I'm bootstrapping, it's going to happen that people who have no business translating will slip through the cracks. The best I can do for now is to make sure there are no repeat offenders.

Just have a quick "test" and have a few bi-directional translations with multi-choice they have to get right. 100% pass or nothing.

Re: Tell HN: I made a freelance translation site in only 5 months

#27
post #22

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…

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

Re: Tell HN: I made a freelance translation site in only 5 months

#28
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Quite the same here. I can read French pretty well, but I make a fool of myself writing it.

Re: Tell HN: I made a freelance translation site in only 5 months

#29
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.

Re: Tell HN: I made a freelance translation site in only 5 months

#30
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?

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