MyGengo – Human Language Translation in a Hurry
Language translation is nothing new to the Web or IT. From Babel Fish to Google’s WordMonkey, machine translation of human language has been tried and tried again. These might work if you just have a few words, but what about when you need accurate translations of sentences or whole documents?
Hiring a human speaker is the way to go, but finding one is not always easy. MyGengo.com is a marketplace of translators who can be accessed by anyone with something to translate and the money to pay for it. Starting at 5 cents per word, the service matches your translation needs to native speakers who will do the work.
Most common document forms can be sent for translation: MS Office documents (including Word), HTML, plain text, PDF, etc. Premium services cost more, but can mean better results, depending on your needs. Pricing is by the word and generally reasonable.
MyGengo offers services translating between English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Italian and Russian and is basically a crowd sourced application. The site has over 600 translators waiting for you to send your document for translation and most jobs are done within a few hours.
There are even options for plugging your blog, website, etc. into MyGengo and having it translated as it updates. This is done through an API. Another option for developers is called String, which allows management of a multi-language website through a dashboard and the MyGengo API, making tracking translations and updates of multiple website pages and languages easier.
MyGengo started in 2008 as a Tokyo-based startup and has received heavy investment from Dave McClure as it entered the North American market earlier this year.
