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The web, more than anything else, showcases Content. And Content is produced in one language, but often, consumed in many. Hence, one of the most popular web services categories is Language Translation.
There are 3,339 sites on the web that provide some sort of language translation services, according to Alexa. It is a heavily manual task, and if you have experience with Google’s translation service, you probably know that automated translation produces garbage.
The most visited sites in all ‘Translation’ categories, just to give you a flavor of the popularity of these services, which, presumably, confirms demand, are:
Worldlingo www.worldlingo.com - Alexa Rank: 2,014
ProZ.com www.proz.com - Alexa Rank 6,232
Lingo24 www.lingo24.com - Alexa Rank 15,306
Language and Translation www.foreignword.com - Alexa Rank 15,591
Applied Language Solutions www.appliedlanguage.com - Alexa Rank 20,581
TRADUguide www.traduguide.com - Alexa Rank 22,540
Trusted Translations www.trustedtranslations.com - Alexa Rank 25,228
Betranslated www.betranslated.com - Alexa Rank 37,651
TranslatorsCafe.com translatorscafe.com - Alexa Rank 40,929
SDL International www.sdl.com - Alexa Rank 64,276
Your opportunity: a Tranlsation SaaS.
Mr. Ramana,
Translation SaaS is indeed a fantastic way of looking into. In fact, i was toying with that idea over here in Chennai with couple of my folks on creating a neutral/india centric newspaperish stie on the web. The idea is every news can be read in the language of the user’s choice, say Hindi, Telugu,Tamil, Marati, Bengali etc. Since a country like India needs this, this can be a better model. Btw, your contact information is showing an error. check that
Machine translation and Voice recognition share a lot of common elements.
There has been a remarkable consolidation in the voice recognition business and the shrewd winner seems to be Scansoft now calls itself Nuance Communications (after the Nuance acquisition)
Scansoft was a spin-off from Xerox (NYSE: XRX), It was an optical character recognition (OCR) company to convert paper documents to electronic formats. In 2001 however the company decided to add speech technology to its OCR business by buying Lernout &Hauspie’s assets out of bankruptcy for $59.5 million. L&H was the wunderkid of the go-go 90’s tech bull market, it once had a valuation of $10B, the company imploded in accounting scandals and management malfeasense. Since then, ScanSoft has shrewdly made a dozen other acquisitions in the speech arena. In 2002 it added telecommunications capabilities by buying a once hot MIT startup Speechworks. In addition, it purchased MedRemote, a medical dictation specialist, and, of course, Nuance, which was the leader in speech recognition technology. After the merger the Scansoft took on the name Nuance Communications.
The company is now made up of four segments: imaging, network speech, embedded speech,
and dictation.
It seems that adding translation SaaS to its stable would be a natural for a company like Nuance, it probably has the talent (linguists and programmers) and experience
More on the rise of Nuance and its solid position.
http://soundmoney.blogspot.com/2006/04/nothing-nuanced-about-playing-vc-at.html
Hmm, Ashish, is Google planning to buy Nuance?
Sramana
nice analysis. I wana add my 2 cents as well.
I realized that proz has now moved to the 4000 ranking in alexa. Also, i realized that freetranslation.com is ranked in the two thousands and is perhaps another site of www.sdl.com? I tried surfing thru sdl, i find the site really comprehensive, and mayb even a lil too corporate looking (which sometimes scares of average translator like me
)
There is another player - language123.com. I thought that some of the features are really cool, but somehow i think their ranking stayed stagnant and was on the dropping end in alexa.