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Comment by vmarsy | Hacker News Reader

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vmarsy

I didn't know the product by itself, I'm not commenting about the API.

Seems a really good idea, however I looked at:

http://news.unbabel.co/fr/fobo-est-presente-a-san-francisco-...

Vs.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/10/fobo/

and the translation, by _5_ people, is really poor: Just look at the first line :

>Maintenant, vous sauriez déjà que Craigslist n'est pas bon comme un lieu pour vendre votre produits.

This translation is unpleasant to read and has some mistakes. Google translate gave me a better translation.

I guess the problem comes from the fact that translators are not native in the target language. When you use the product, can you request native language translators ?

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The content you see on the news.unbabel.com website is translated by all the user community on unbabel. However, only about 15% of our users, the best ones, are given paid translation tasks. We select these 15% based on the feedback system on which users give each other feedback and continuously improve. This and other measures are increasing the overall quality of the translations gradually.

Also, you are correct, one of the things we are noticing is that requiring that the translator be native in the target language provides significant quality. As we increase the community, we will optimize for that. Thanks for commenting.

As mmastrac said, if there's a way to add hints to the translator on how to translate small sentences (for a mobile app for instance) I'll definitely use your product!

For me, having a native translator seems a must have, I hope your community will grow enough for it to be possible!

There is already a way to send comments to the translator, Thank you for your comment. When you send the message you can define the tone and give specific instructions. We also have an beta version of the android app and are almost ready to launch iphone. Also, we already have a lot of natives in the platform. For paid tasks, the quality is vastly superior to the news. I would invite you to try. Top up and experiment with giving instructions to the translators. And please get in touch with us, I would love to chat.

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