I've been working on launching a site like this for the last 5 months. Feel free to check it out: http://www.caterpi.com/

Also some competitors in the same space: http://onehourtranslation.com and http://mygengo.com

I like your site. It seems fast and simple, though I didn't step totally through the process. You don't require a lengthy sign-up, and it's obvious what I pay and what I get.

You have set up your site a lot like the traditional sites it seems, whereby you manage the stable of translators. Did you consider doing the site more like 99Designs, where the crowd decides without mediation?

I don't think of Caterpi as something to manage translators; it's more of a platform for translators. This is an important distinction to make, since traditionally, translation agencies frown upon direct communication between translators and their clients.

I haven't really thought about having the crowd compete to win a translation contest. It seems like it could be viable for long/costly translations, where each competitor would submit a small portion of the translated text.

If you're looking for more information, I'd check out mygengo's blog. It turns out the majority of their translations are for short snippets of text (such as emails). I do think that translation is a big market, and that it's only going to get bigger -- so it's definitely worth researching.

One of the problems that I've had with lowest bidder translations is that the cost of a poor translation can be quite high. Working on a large real estate management application a few years ago, we hired a firm based on cost alone for a bunch of translations; and they did some weird things like using the word for "zipper" when we wanted "zip code". The translations were generally correct, but little things like that really made us look pretty bad in the eyes of our international customers.

So, my point is that I would go out and look for a company that had a good translation track record before trusting the public face of my company to someone on the basis of cost.

1) Similar to 99Designs, etc, everyone could vote on quality, so that could give you some confidence in the text.

2) Translator users could accumulate karma and reviews.

3) Translators' previous work would be public for inspection, and you could see comments and votes on previous work.

4) The requester could seek higher quality by offering a higher price.

Find the mistake in the following sentence which cost my company $X (can't tell you, but it is eyepopping):

"The subject registration screen should list the lecture subject name, drawn from the database table for the lectures subject name."

There should be an apostrophe in lecture's.

Did that cost you money?

Hitting the Big Red Button on a software project is cheaper, but not free. (For example, the Big Red Button plan for customer acceptance testing might sound like "Nobody goes home if there is an unknown risk to delivery", and a translation error anywhere means there is an unknown risk to delivery until you have verified that whatever process introduced the error was not similarly out of control elsewhere.)

Great idea.

I wonder if there are other ways to confirm data in other instances... (Where recaptha-like processing is n/a).

The YC-segment could probably be convinced to use something like this (I'd use it if the editing/checking worked well). I know of several tech-startups that use mturk in a way similar to what you describe.

A big hurdle for wider uptake would be confidentiality of texts to be translated.

I made it up Kili once, but Everest is a different beast.

Extra points:

  * have the translators know about iPhone and the app, 
    so that they have context
  * support for incremental translation (so that terms 
    stay consistent as you add features)
  * automatically validate .strings file format on submission.

If you could get set up with translators you liked, and the site facilitated long term relationships, that would be really powerful. The site would need some sort of specialized, versioned CMS.

They dont do version control yet, that would be nice and as for price it is the lowest price I found for professional translation. They charge the same price for all languages and they dont charge extra for fast delivery.

Google is free but I would use it only for reading never for writing.

One way to find rough use data would be to find the existing sites, then plug them into http://quantcast.com and look at the traffic numbers.

I have met people who call themselves freelance translators, and after they finish my translation, they are eager for more at the same rate.

This ad has been the most effective for me:

Translate a bit of English text into another language.

Please email me at andrew@gaiagps.com to tell me what language you want to translate to, and I will email you the text to translate. The potential languages are Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, French, Russian, Japanese, and Korean. No other languages are needed.

Do not use an automatic translator. I have checked all of them. You shouldn't email me unless you are a native speaker. If you do not have Chinese relatives or a degree in Chinese from a university, then you cannot do the Chinese translation. The same goes for all the other languages.

I have gotten hundreds of responses, mostly from Indians who claim to do the translation, but they use an online translator. If you are one of these, don't bother - you are just wasting your time. If you are a special guy in India who knows Russian or some other language, then send me a really convincing email, or I'm just going to delete it with all the spam.