Re:Ask HN: What are the least competitive consumer and enter...
by trevett on Thursday August 06, 2020 @04:47PM
(#24075306)
At a previous job I built an internal translation system forked from pootle because the commercial options were so bad (mostly wrt UX). This was 8 years ago, so I would have to do a survey to learn what the state of things is today. It's possible the existing solutions are "good enough" and the switching / retraining costs aren't worth it for most organizations. Not to be too Thiely, but I wonder what a 10x improvement looks like in this space as well.
Re:Ask HN: What are the least competitive consumer and enter...
by tcmb on Thursday August 06, 2020 @05:49PM
(#24075838)
Switching costs is a fair point. I think the biggest improvements can be made in UX and in having great APIs which enable integration and automation.
Re:Ask HN: What are the least competitive consumer and enter...
by gsjbjt on Friday August 07, 2020 @01:08PM
(#24084184)
I’m working at Lilt (lilt.com) right now, and this is exactly why I’m excited about the company ;)
Re:Ask HN: What are the least competitive consumer and enter...
by nojs on Thursday August 06, 2020 @05:38PM
(#24075735)
If you can remember the title of the book I’d love to read it.
Re:Ask HN: What are the least competitive consumer and enter...
by tcmb on Thursday August 06, 2020 @05:58PM
(#24075916)
It’s called ‘The General Theory of the Translation Company’ by R. Beninatto and T. Johnson.
Re:Ask HN: What are the least competitive consumer and enter...
by severine on Friday August 07, 2020 @03:46AM
(#24079394)
Thanks a lot for diggin' it out! Looks really interesting, yay!
There is software for translation management, which is essentially project management, but because of the intricacies of the business there is specialized software for it. There are maybe 2 or 3 main competitors, all of which do the job but are fairly awful to use. Then there are a handful of products which come from computer-assisted translation (CAT, which is different from machine translation), and try to capture the project management part as well. Because their focus is on CAT, they're also not excellent in the management aspect.
If you want to capture the whole spectrum with all the edge cases, it's going to be a very complex product which will require a lot of user research and take a fairly long time to build. But there might be an opportunity to go to market earlier, with a subset of the functionality, and build from there.