Yesterday, I wrote a blog post about making a game-like translation site, similar to 99Designs, Crowdspring, and StackOverflow. Recently, I have been using Mechanical Turk to get translations done for Gaia GPS and our other iPhone apps, and that process made me start dreaming about a better way translate text.
There was a great conversation about this on Hacker News, and I learned a lot about the space. People told me they would in fact use this site, they told me how they would use the site, and I also got a bunch of great research on the subject, including a business plan from a very intelligent and thorough Sloan grad. So, now I’m doubly excited, and I am going to do this idea after all. This may actually be the first business idea I have had that truly doesn’t seem to exist, which is another reason I’m interested in the project.
I am going to try and get a prototype done this week, with the aid of my two co-founders. It won’t be pretty, but it will aim for simple and functional from the start. To get started, I have sketched out the core features I think should be in this website, as well as some potential names, because that’s the fun part. If anyone out there has more ideas on this site, or feedback on this sketch, please post your thoughts on the Hacker News forum. Also, if you think this is a great project too, feel free to steal any of these ideas and try to implement it yourself. We’ll race you to the finish line 🙂
After I firm up the base functionality, I’ll wireframe the site and create a data model to share and discuss.
Translator Features
- submit translations
- edit translations
- revert edits of lower ranked translators
- profile shows points earned in each language
- enter name, description of skills, and picture in profile
Requester Features
- submit text to be translated
- offer a $ bounty on translations (put bounty into Escrow, and can accept a given translation or the community’s votes decide who gets it)
- view versioned history of translations, with ability to revert edits
- enter name, description in profile
Scoring (per language and overall)
- +1 point for voting
- +3 points for submitting a translation
- +10 points for having the accepted translation
- +/-1 point per vote gotten on a translation
- +2 points for editing a translation
- -4 points for having an edit reverted and flagged by the owner or a high level translator (reverter chooses whether to dock points)
Other Notes
- Login in via OpenAuth (same as StackOverflow)
- what should I use for payments? maybe start with Amazon and PayPal or something?
- threaded comments on translations (use my AJAX comment widget or Disqus?)
- requires a simple interface to request a translation in multiple languages
- translators can revert the edits of anyone lower ranked, and they must leave a comment
- moderators will police the site, originally will just be the founders, until the game and community can keep things balanced
Infrastructure
- Python/Django/Postrgres
- EC2
- Javascript
Other Good Ideas, but not for Version 1
- confidential translations
- use Google Translate API to detect similarities and reject machine translations
- badges and titles to honor achievements in a given language
- probably better than the straight numeric score
- recommend/review translators and requesters
- use the Facebook social graph to help create trust
- increasing need to combat fraud – prevent people from getting good translations and then diverting money to their friends
- some sort of mark-up language to use within translations
Name Ideas
- unbabel.com
- crowdbabel.com
- tonguewars.com
- multivox.com
- wonderwords.com
