As if we needed another one. A new company which offers cheap, fast turnaround translations has emerged on the Internet. This company, TranslationZen, uses native speakers — who are not necessarily professional translators — to do the translation work. And the price is a bargain. Only US$0.067 per word.
How can they provide quality translations at such low prices? Simple answer: they can’t. Everyone knows the old saying: “you can only get 2 out of 3 (quality, price, speed).” At such low prices, and at such fast delivery times (they advertise delivery in up to 24 hours but don’t specify how much text they can deliver), the quality has to be lousy. Furthermore, using questionable talent from the crowd makes this an iffy proposition from the start.
I tried to obtain a quote from the website but got a message in every language pair that “The languages you selected are coming soon.” So it is unclear how ready the platform is and whether one can indeed order translation services from TranslationZen at this point in time.
TranslationZen is powered by ClowdCroud, a San Francisco Labor-as-a-Service startup. I read about it here.
