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

http://www.caterpi.com

by csytan • 16 years ago

54 54 16 years ago

csytan13• 16 years ago

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

alanthonyc• 16 years ago

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.

Goosey• 16 years ago

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?

csytan13• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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 ;)

d0m• 16 years ago

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.

csytan13• 16 years ago

Thanks, I'll fix that asap.

teej• 16 years ago

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.

csytan13• 16 years ago

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

suckafree2• 16 years ago

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.

suckafree2• 16 years ago

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.

csytan13• 16 years ago

Good advice, thanks.

barry-cotter2• 16 years ago

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.

csytan13• 16 years ago

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!

Qz• 16 years ago

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

knuton• 16 years ago

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.

zackattack• 16 years ago

Me too! Who designed it for you? It's so awesome =)

csytan13• 16 years ago

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 :)

bryanh• 16 years ago

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.

braindead_in• 16 years ago

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

basugasubaku• 16 years ago

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)

csytan13• 16 years ago

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.

corruption• 16 years ago

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

mromaine2• 16 years ago

(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• 16 years ago

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

riffraff2• 16 years ago

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 :)

csytan13• 16 years ago

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.

riffraff2• 16 years ago

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.

barry-cotter2• 16 years ago

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.

kyro• 16 years ago

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

revorad• 16 years ago

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?

milkshakes• 16 years ago

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.

tigerthink2• 16 years ago

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?

csytan13• 16 years ago

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

tigerthink2• 16 years ago

"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.

wlievens2• 16 years ago

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.

csytan13• 16 years ago

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

mromaine2• 16 years ago

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

robert_mygengo2• 16 years ago

Yeah - seems like a great resource for spammers :(

joss82• 16 years ago

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

Good spam filters killed it (gmail and co).

csytan13• 16 years ago

It's so that freelancers can be contacted directly without going through the site. Currently, emails are obfuscated with javascript, but I should really add the option to hide emails (or only expose them for translators).

ulugbek• 16 years ago

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.

hristov• 16 years ago

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.

empire29• 16 years ago

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"

waxman2• 16 years ago

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...

mrtron• 16 years ago

I was thinking oh you only have english -> french so far. Have those in viewable lists without mousing over.

csytan13• 16 years ago

Done!

waxman2• 16 years ago

Awesome!

thinkbohemian• 16 years ago

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.

jackfoxy• 16 years ago

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.

alekst• 16 years ago

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?

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

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