On-line translation empire garners $10m investment
Published: 06 January 2014
From The Times of Israel...
Article Excerpt: One Hour Translation COO Lior Libman thought he saw a major market opportunity in the translation market – and he was right. Necessity is the mother of invention, and innovation – and necessity is what led Lior Libman to build his innovative on-line translation service, One Hour Translation. With 15,000 translators in 120 countries working for him, translating between more than 2,500 language pairs (all the combinations of the 75 languages OHT handles), OHT, if not the largest translation service in the world, is, Libman said, “the fastest,” adding that the company’s name isn’t just a marketing gimmick; OHT will do translations (single page, up to 200 words) in an hour or less, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Link to the full news story here.
InterpretAmerica's Take: Yep, we're starting off our 2014 highlighting of news about interpreting with a story about translation. Bear with us, as this story is definitely relevant. A few months back, we published a blog post on the ways the mobile revolution is blurring the lines between traditional definitions of interpreting and translation. This blurring comes from both directions, with the need for quick written translations of oral speech such as chats and texts, as well as increasing pressure for extremely quick turnarounds for short written communications that can be close to realtime, such as emails. Many startup companies are striving to find that magic solution that will provide access to human translators and interpreters 24/7 for brief written and spoken communications with an extremely brief turnaround time. This story highlights one company pioneering just such a model, blending traditional translation agency infrastructure with innovative service offerings that tap into crowdsourcing and gamification models to create that real-time access. The good news? Everyone gets paid for their work, and the better your work, the higher your pay. It is only a matter of time before interpreting companies seeking to crack this same nut from the speech side of the communication coin take note of what OHT and other translation companies are up to.
