As someone who has worked extensively with foreign languages, I know firsthand that translation can be a nightmare. As such, I am a sucker for a solid crowdsourcing app that focuses on translation. Babelverse is such an app, aiming to allow people to communicate seamlessly, wherever they are, in their own language(s).
Babelverse works by recruiting multilinguists to be “on call” at designated times to receive translation requests from their mobile application. Newbie translators start with casual conversations, and the client rates them after every session. Positive ratings increase their credibility and open up more translation opportunities for them. Interpreters are paid 70% of the interpretation fee as their reimbursement, and Babelverse decides their rates based on several parameters in order to avoid a “bid to the bottom”.
Human translation is preferable to computer-aided translation in almost every case, so this is a platform I’d be excited to see take off. My own knowledge of French is “un peu mauvais” at best, so if I have any true multilingual readers, I’d be interested to hear about the platform from an insider’s perspective.
