The Voice of LingoTech
Alex Buran
Founder of Lackuna.com
Homepage: http://www.lackuna.com/
Posts by Alex Buran
The Magic of Proz.com
Mar 19th
I’ve started my translation agency back in 2002 and was able to deliver projects in the following way:
- Advertize
- Find a client
- Give a free quote
- Get a job (and payment upfront)
- Find a freelancer
- Assign a job
- Deliver translation.
In the beginning, I didn’t have anything, but HTML skills. Finding the right freelancer in the right language pair is a key parameter for this industry. Proz.com allowed me to tap into the best pool of freelance translators. It worked so flawlessly and fast, that it took me only 2-3 hours to find a right freelancer and assign a job. It worked like magic. Try to do something similar with other projects such as website development. I bet you will be searching for freelancers for weeks, if not months.
Proz.com was a great website. But somewhere around 2010 it started to crack. It infamously banned TransPerfect from posting jobs on it: http://blog.gts-translation.com/2010/11/23/proz-com-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ and it subsequently banned our agency. In both cases, proz.com justified it as “non-payers”. And it hurt. It really hurt. By not being able to find new freelancers quickly and “magically”, the entire operation was put at risk. We coped with it and survived it. Like cancer survivors? You bet.
Since then, I’ve put a broad company’s mission to fire every single freelancer from not only our agency, but put the entire industry at the edge of extinction. It’s still a work in progress and it is not as easy as it sounds. But we make some progress with Translation Cloud. More >
Submit a Guest Article
Feb 29th
Have something interesting cooking out there? Shoot us an email at tips@lackuna.com
Guest bloggers are welcome!
Why Translation Cloud is going to be the Next Babel Tower?
Feb 21st
Tower of Babel, Translation Cloud
We live in an imperfect world. The MTA subway doesn’t run on schedule. It constantly betrays the lives of thousands of passengers and makes the hopes of getting from point A to point B as safely and as quickly as possible just a mere dream.
I live in the imperfect world too. Just like any human being, I see that things don’t work out and that I can’t always take my life too seriously. If I did, perhaps, I’d either commit suicide or go crazy and get sentenced to schizophrenia clinic!
And, of course, there’s always language translation. If you believe that you will build an amazon.com-like, easy-to-use online language translation tool and make a lot of money, I am going to disappoint you. 99.99% of the time it is not going to happen. At least not in Amazon’s way. And not with language itself.
More >
Starting a start-up
Jan 14th
But if you want to build a feature that pretends to be a product that pretends to be a “startup” and you want to raise a bunch of cash from douchebags in order to flip it to Google or whomever in 18 months— then the valley is the only place to do that. - Jessica Darko“
It’s New York, baby. Everyone is here if full of crap. Fake people, searching fake opportunities, making fake friends, earning fake living.
What is happening since 2007?
I think Amazon Web Services has done more damage to the tech industry, than any other technology altogether. On top of it, all these Android and iOS app have sparked such a huge demand of IT, that companies no longer can outsource it to India and have to scramble to find local talents. Big companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook all opened up offices in Manhattan. The NYC despite being a huge city has become a desert when it comes for the search of talent. Clueless, would-be, so-called programmers ask for 100K starting salaries. They can’t program. They just want the money.
Year 2012.
More >
So, How Much Your Tiny Translation Business You Said Is Worth?
Dec 24th
The year is over and the most important question is not how much new technology you have developed. The main question is not how many emails or phone calls you have answered. The main question is not even how many Fortune 500 clients you have signed up. The main question is how much money your little translation company has made! It all boils down to cash, people. So, how our neglected translation industry stacks up among the US companies based on INC 500/5000 list? Take a look.
| 1283 | G3 Translate | 225% | $2.8 million |
| 1474 | Global Language Solutions | 190% | $9.9 million |
| 1517 | SignTalk | 183% | $4.1 million |
| 1886 | Language Services Associates | 137% | $26.8 million |
| 2230 | CyraCom International | 111% | $37.4 million |
| 2328 | Welocalize | 104% | $59.6 million |
| 3117 | CETRA Language Solutions | 64% | $3.8 million |
| 3202 | Universal Language Service | 61% | $5 million |
| 3216 | TransPerfect | 61% | $251.2 million |
| 3338 | ProTranslating | 55% | $11.1 million |
| 3548 | U.S. Translation | 48% | $2.2 million |
| 3771 | Para-Plus Translations | 39% | $2.3 million |
| 3935 | Geneva Worldwide | 34% | $7.5 million |
| 4003 | Dynamic Language Center | 32% | $6.8 million |
| 4412 | Fluent Language Solutions | 21% | $5.9 million |
So, the average company is making like 29 million dollars in revenue. All these self-proclaimed analysts that say that Translation Industry is 30 billion worth are delusional. Really? Yep. Seem like so!
Opinions?
Will America Be Saved by Website Translation? How to Choose the Right One?
Nov 22nd
As the world becomes more global, interrelated and there is still no red tape on global online sales, an increasing amount of business owners realizes the potential in having their website translated into foreign languages. This brings new sales leads and increasing brand awareness globally. On top of it, the recent observations of people’s connectivity on Facebook reveal a shocking pattern: there are only 5 people in between any two individuals. The chain of separation got smaller from the observed 6 people by Stanley Milgram in 1960. Plus, the internet as a platform is inherently global. It only takes you one click to reach any, even the most distant website in the world. All that creates an urgent need to do something in order to market your brand not just locally, like brick and mortar shop, but market it everywhere. If customers can connect in just one click, it is important to convey your message.
So, what options the webmasters have at this time? There are two main options: widgets and Foreign Content Delivery Networks. Widgets are the small pieces of code that webmasters install into their existing websites that allow visitors to click on languages or flags and translate the pages on the fly. While Foreign Content Delivery Networks (FCDN) use cloud based approach and re-create mirror copies of your websites that allow for easy search engine crawling, geo-targeting and crowdsourcing.
Leaders in widget based website translation:
More >
Why Do Most Translation Agencies Suck?
Oct 23rd
After I returned from Localization World Conference in Santa Clara, CA, I was slightly bewildered and frustrated. It was my first such experience meeting the titans of translation industry, the companies I admired. Back in 2002, when I was a freshman at college, I dreamt about taking on the biggest of the biggest translation companies, imagining my agency servicing largest fortune 500 companies, making millions of dollars per project, having booked up years in advance and so on. Now, 9 years later, and having spent countless hours fighting up with competitors online and offline, I’ve arrived to a place where these competitors were hanging out and perceived first hand what they’ve got. To my utter disappointment, not much. My adolescent illusions were all crushed.
If the general tech industry powered by Facebook.com, Google.com and Amazon.com is growing like a weed; the translation industry is notoriously conservative and ferociously low tech. I thought my company was still an underdog that was trying to figure things out, but after I’ve spent a day listening to presentations from some companies who position themselves as experts, I was disillusioned big time. To make it straight, I haven’t leant anything valuable at that conference. It seems that large companies that presented there are large because of different reasons, not because they are in translation/localization business. Isn’t it weird? Translation is still an after thought, and, perhaps, would never be treated accordingly.
When I met localization team from LinkedIn during a lunch break and asked them what was the biggest obstacle of working with translation agencies like mine, they replied that is was reliability. The thing is that translation agencies are employing the same pool of freelance translators that work from home. If you look at resumes of translators, they all worked for many of your competitors already. Large outsources such as LinkedIn, don’t trust translation quality of the agencies. Ever. I know that I wouldn’t too. That’s why large companies are no longer outsource anything substantial. They hire linguists internally and always proofread what they get from freelancers. Agencies seem like redundant middlemen, unable to compete neither on price, nor on quality. You can say whatever you want at your website, but when it comes to the actual quality, you can’t offer anything of value to the large clients. Thus, the amount of work is evaporating, leaving translation agencies at a brink of extinction.
More >
Each Time We Fire a Professional Translator, Our Quality Improves. Part III.
Sep 12th
This post is a logical continuation of my previous two posts: Part I and Part II
Both of them had a huge uproar in the linguist community sparkling heated debates on such forums as Proz.com and TranslatorsCafe.com. Thus, the disruption saga continues:
Angry Translators
Language translation industry is old as hell. Translators are tired, underpaid and angry. Translation agencies, facing more demanding clients that ask for lower rates, in turn, seek translators who would work for less and for longer hours. There is even a mocking discussion on LinkedIn exploring this uneasy topic: “Lower your rate and we’ll send you more work. You may have some hours left on weekends, holidays or your child’s birthday.” http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Cynical-Lower-your-rate-well
But there is a more general trend going on and it is very well described by this quite insightful article written by Luigi Muzzi on the topic of “Cloud Translation”: http://www.slideshare.net/muzii/cloud-translation
The main point of it is that the translation industry is very conservative, there are absolutely no innovations going forward, just the same old pony tricks – the processes of reliance on the weakest link – freelance translators.
Amid Severe Double Deep Recession, Translation Services USA Still Hires!
Aug 8th
The recession stops in our company. We never let bad news touch our business, our people and our work. Technology is everything. And we are hiring.
Translation Services USA has designed an internship program for college students with good academic standing as well as full-time positions for experienced developers. We are working to change the world in the same way Google did for the search, in the same way Amazon.com did for e-commerce, in the same way Apple did it for personal computers.
Inquire about our current jobs at our job board. We always look for the best people out there.
P.S. So, hopefully, we will be in the same list with these NYC start-ups! http://www.businessinsider.com/sa100-2010
Unstoppable Growth of Translation Cloud – Now 5,000 Translators.
Jul 20th
It’s amazing how some things can pan out. In just a couple of months, our new and barely known project has attracted a massive amount of registered users – all with very little advertizing.
What’s our secret? Yes, there is one. We’ve decided to build a translation platform which would actually treat freelance translators in a right way. Unlike other translation agencies, that exploit poor freelancers, beat them down with low rates, unrealistic deadlines and requirements to work during nights and weekends; we took a more holistic approach. Translation Cloud enables our freelancers to earn more money per hour, have no commitments to deadline (how disruptive is that?!) and minimal barriers of entry (no software required – browser based).
Translation Services USA feels confident that our new product is going to make huge PR waves in the translation industry. Sometimes we feel that our industry is old and stagnant (even dying), but when we re-invent new high-tech tools such as Translation Cloud, the rules of the game start fresh and we begin to hear from lots of Fortune 500 companies, the ones we couldn’t reach for over 5 years! That’s the power of innovation. That’s the power of Translation Cloud.
I’ve heard once this phrase from a disgruntled translator who didn’t understand our new business idea. He left this dark comment on our blog: “Cloud my ass”. It was short and sweet. And it was bitter. Well, dude, what can I say to you now? We did it anyway and we are successful. Staying focused on a great product just like Steve Jobs; that’s what makes us different.
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