Via this GigaOm blog post I came across an interesting service – myGengo. I’ve had plenty of projects that dealt with multi-lingual issues, and professional, punctual translations were always a pain in the process. So it is nice to see a company that uses, in my opinion, a very correct approach to the problem.
Right now, the translation market has two main segments: a high-end market dominated by full-time in-house translators, and a low-end market dominated by Google Translate. myGengo’s service aims to occupy the space in between the two markets by offering “human translation services at scale.”
Essentially, myGengo is like an oDesk built specifically for translation services. myGengo has assembled a group of more than 3,000 translators worldwide who work on a freelance basis through myGengo’s own dedicated software program. myGengo serves clients directly, and also has an API to let other startups include myGengo’s translation services in their apps. myGengo says it is targeted at people and businesses who occasionally need high-quality, fast translation services, but aren’t in the market to hire an in-house translator for the job.
0.5 USD cents per word, 1 to 16 hours per page (depending on the complexity of the document), human translation with pre-tested personnel, API integration – it sounds almost like a dream. Of course, for now they only support a dozen or so languages, but given that they just received a $5.25 million Series A funding, I expect the service to expand quite a bit in the nearest future.
The problem of myGengo is that it does not use professional translators but rather people speaking that language… because of that they will not be able to give you high-quality texts that a traditional translation company will.