Any money to be made in translating?
 

How many of you regulary pay translators to translate your website(s) to a foreign language?

Not regulary but I have a few times ..

Not as long as I can go to babelfish and do it for free.......

http://babelfish.yahoo.com/

あなたの口から出る何があなたのろくでなしに洗剤の臭いがする屁がそしてある。

You can use Google Translate, and Babel fish for small things, and sometimes that doesn't come across the way it should.There is nothing better than human translators that localize text, and target dialect. Software just can't do it. By all means if your budget doesn't allow it. I would probably use it as well, but if your looking for professional work by human translators please feel free to hit me up!

Babelfish is really bad...................

risky. lots of money can be lost in translation.

To answer your question. Look at the top 100 sites on the web.

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sit...obal&lang=none

and look at how many localize. A coincidence? Although for many years English was know to be the language of the web. Times have changed, and more countries have strengthened their infrastructure to be able to let everyone in their regions be able to access the web.

Our clients have seen a steady increase in traffic/conversions, and processing (depending on how you go about that) just by localizing. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me below. :thumbsup

:1orglaugh...

There is SOME money to be made, people keeps looking for the best at outsourcing prices.

Hey Omar, I just sent you an email :thumbsup

Got it!

Loooking at it now. Will be responding shortly.:)

You can't be serious. The results of those automated translations are horrible and if you use any of that text on your website, the whole site will end up being a joke.

let me guess

you only speak english?!?

otherwise you would never ever say such a thing

Do you have to reach Native level to be able to translate websites? Is that all anyone would pay for? So if I reached Advanced Level German, would I be of any value? It would sure be better than someone using Babelfish. I agree, Babelfish is hardly reliable.

You...must...be...fucking...kidding...me :1orglaugh

My problem with translators is that it's hard to find any industry/niche-specific experts.
They need to understand and be accustomed to the lingo. Hard to find good ones.

Interesting, and very good point. See, I bet you there is money to be made here then. So let's say I reach Advanced Level German, both written and spoken. Then I travel to Germany for a year to become Fluent. While there, I learn how to speak and write erotic German. I come back here to the US and offer my services. Would it work? How would anyone be able to tell if I was really legit? Also, why wouldn't you be able to find someone who is in Germany who can do this? Most Germans learn English as a second language now. Most of the young people speak it.

Or is German a bad choice? I just happen to like German. Everyone else is learning Spanish, and it's very competitive. I took German in HS, and now I want to relearn what I've forgotten and go deeper into the language than I did before.

In porn, I would go for Japanese. Sounds silly, but they pay!

EuroRevenue just partnered with DCAJapan to launch a site in Japanese, with Japanese back end, etc. I think this was a great move on their part...:2 cents:

Germany is a big country and they are big on fetish sites. So if you have fetish websites it might be more than profitable to translate them.

Germany still dubs movies and tv-shows. So a lot of Germans surf German sites as much as possible because their English is crap

However, like you said: it's probably better to find a local party. So for German you find somebody in Germany. But, that person needs to be a porn afficionado(spelling?) otherwise you'll still get a lame translation.

If you want to know if the translation is any good, let some other germans read it.

As an example, let's say you run a hostingcompany in The Netherlands and you want to have an English translation for your website.

The terminology used in the hosting scene is not something an ordinary person would be acqainted with. So you'll have to find a translator that is.