Wordparrot.com 商業計劃書

Abstract

The issue of how to translate something is a problem that inevitably comes up in one’s academic, professional, or personal life. The most immediate instinct one might have is, “do I know someone who can help me take care of this?” And in many cases, that need can be quickly and painlessly resolved by a friend or colleague. But in other cases, this solution becomes more complicated. What if this person can’t be bothered to get the job done? What if speed or quality is an issue? The idea for Wordparrot was borne out of a number of experiences in Taiwan with people who have, in their past experiences with translation companies, lamented the high cost, inconsistent quality, or both at once. At the same time, it is the result of the founder’s lifelong fascination with languages, foreign cultures, and the funny results that often occur from attempting to bring the real meaning of a phrase from one cultural understanding to another. The essential goal of Wordparrot is to use the open source tools and APIs available on the 21st-century Internet to build a translation marketplace for the end consumer. Customers can create accounts, upload files, and be connected to a global network of translators who will perform translation services for a fee. It is neither a revolutionary idea, nor one that requires a Ph.D. in computational linguistics. The intended drivers of profit for the company will be a high volume of low-margin transactions through a globally accessible platform. The company’s differentiating qualities will be the convenience features of the web application and the company’s ability to globally source and showcase translator expertise. Until computer scientists figure out how to make computers render translations that are indistinguishable from that of humans at large scale, human beings will have a role to play in making it work. Languages are constantly evolving, and machines still have great difficulty in capturing the shared, unspoken understanding between speaker and listener that is necessary to express ideas accurately on paper. That’s not to say that computers don’t have any role to play – they have revolutionized the field. From the standpoint of future business, it is better to think not in terms of “machine translation” but rather that “machine-augmented human translation” as the new standard for some time. The chapter ‘The Automation Question’ goes deeper into this important issue. Utilizing machine-translation APIs like Microsoft Translator to increase productivity is an eventual goal for the company. But for now, the company believes value can be delivered and profit can be made by achieving much simpler goals – finding customers who need translation, either singularly or as a regular business/institutional requirement, and bringing them together on a platform with translators available remotely for work on a regular or short-term basis. The platform’s eventual goal is to offer quality and convenience by encapsulating the various types of technologies that can enhance the convenience for both sides – social media-based authentication, file uploading and storage, and payment processing not just with credit cards but also Paypal, Apple Pay, and Android Pay. More ambitious goals are to develop web-based chat, videoconferencing, and project management tools to help translators and customers coordinate difficult projects that require multiple stages of revision.