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

54 点作者 csytan大约 15 年前

25 条评论

wlievens大约 15 年前
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.
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riffraff大约 15 年前
it seems simple which is good, but it also seems way too simple. Some suggestions<p>* I understand why you want to list A-&#62;B and B-&#62;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.<p>* 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.<p>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)<p>I've seen abhorrent translations between niche languages (e.g. hungarian &#38; 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_.<p>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<p>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.<p>But all in all, I wish you the best luck and these are mostly minor nitpicks :)
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tigerthink大约 15 年前
Hm, I'm inclined to think it would have taken me somewhat less time than that. I made this site in about one month:<p><a href="http://deanza.campuseagle.com/books/" rel="nofollow">http://deanza.campuseagle.com/books/</a><p>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.<p>But I'm not the fastest:<p><a href="http://r09.railsrumble.com/entries" rel="nofollow">http://r09.railsrumble.com/entries</a><p>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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teej大约 15 年前
Design: Clearly "inspired" by Basecamp. It's fine for proving the concept, but will have to change once you've ganed some traction.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?"<p>Overall decent job. Keep up the hard work.
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knuton大约 15 年前
I love your logo!<p>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?<p>b. I would expect the Gravatar hash images to be rather confusing for people who do not know what Gravatar is.
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csytan大约 15 年前
I've been working on it as a side project for the past 5 months. Tell me what you think!
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barry-cotter大约 15 年前
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.<p>It's a small thing, but on the language selection menu it'd be nice if I could skip to a language by typing.<p>From the FAQ A: Your text is sent to a pool of translators, one of which [/whom] may choose to accept the job.
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braindead_in大约 15 年前
Nice. We provide transcripts of phone calls to our customers. If someone asks for translations I can surely refer.
Goosey大约 15 年前
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?
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empire29大约 15 年前
You should offer validation services ..<p>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).<p>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?<p>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 &#38; Peace" but they really mean "Supermarket"
waxman大约 15 年前
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...
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basugasubaku大约 15 年前
I like this idea, but the thing I would be most concerned about as a user is translation quality.<p>You might look at these similar sites for ideas:<p><a href="https://www.onehourtranslation.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.onehourtranslation.com/</a> (they also offer an interesting free tweet translation service)<p><a href="http://trans-aid.jp/" rel="nofollow">http://trans-aid.jp/</a> (seems to be all volunteer, Japanese-oriented)
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ulugbek大约 15 年前
Nice job! I used to be in translating business for a short while.<p>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.
hristov大约 15 年前
That looks pretty good. You should however add categories for areas of expertise.<p>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.
revorad大约 15 年前
This is awesome! I just added myself as an English-&#62;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?
jackfoxy大约 15 年前
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.
d0m大约 15 年前
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".<p>then, a good things: 1. Website is pretty clean, I like that.
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bryanh大约 15 年前
I really appreciate the minimalist design and layout. Too many folks clutter up the UI (I'm just as guilty as any).<p>If I need any translation services, your site is bookmarked.
alekst大约 15 年前
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?
kyro大约 15 年前
I was hoping you'd pick the other logo with the librarian looking caterpillar! Anyway, site looks really clean and fresh.
Qz大约 15 年前
Tiny suggestion: make the entire blue and green boxes clickable as links, and give them a bit of mouseover highlighting.
milkshakes大约 15 年前
cool!<p>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.
thinkbohemian大约 15 年前
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.
mromaine大约 15 年前
Funny - why do you expose all emails on your site?
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suckafree大约 15 年前
Good job. I like the space and your site brings real value to everyone coming to the table.<p>URL is solid.<p>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.<p>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.
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