Today I discovered a website called Twiyaku which offers Japanese to English translation service for your tweets. The provider mygengo.com guarantees that they have over 900 professional translators to perform high-quality human translations of your Japanese tweets into English. This pricing scheme is as following:
Plan A:
- 25,000円/月 (monthly fee 25,000 YEN or $276.95 U.S. dollars)
- 3ツイート翻訳/日 (3 tweet translations per day)
- 単一アカウント利用 (used by single account only)
- 12時間以内の納品保証 (guarantee translation within 12 hours)
- 追加ツイート： 3円/文字 (additional translation: 3 YEN per word per Japanese character)
Plan B:
- 50,000円/月 (monthly fee 50,000 YEN or $553.9 U.S. dollars)
- 7ツイート翻訳/日 (7 tweet translations per day)
- 複数アカウント利用 (used by multiple accounts)
- 12時間以内の納品保証(guarantee translation within 12 hours)
- 追加ツイート： 2.7円/文字(additional translation: 2.7 YEN per word per Japanese character)
Plan C:
- 100,000円/月 (monthly fee 100,000 YEN or $1107.8 U.S. dollars)
- 15ツイート翻訳/日 (15 tweet translations per day)
- 複数アカウント利用(used by multiple accounts)
- 4時間以内の納品保証(guarantee translation within 4 hours)
- 追加ツイート： 2.5円/文字 (additional translation: 2.5 YEN per word per Japanese character)
2010-6-24 Update: thanks Robert Laing from mygengo.com for pointing out the price mistakes in additional translation)
The service is still in beta right now, so there is a 20% discount for the monthly fee. They even provide a web-service API for easy integration from your companies internal CMS or marketing workflow to their translation engine.
My comment: this is outrageously expensive! 100,000 YEN per month for 15 translated tweets per day is very unreasonable to me, realizing that one tweet is only as long as 140 characters. Also, I am not very confident that these people are capable of translating emotion, attitude and tone of voice (happy, professional, angry, annoyed), as well as keeping a consistent presentation that reflects your corporate image. I am assuming this pricing scheme is targeting mostly corporate clients, who must be very concerned about and protective to their corporate online presence.
In my previous post ”Tweeting in English? There’s a Book for That“, I talked about a book「英語でTwitter！」that teaches Japanese to tweet about their unsuccessful weight loss progress in English. I thought the idea was quite adorable but never for professional purpose. However a good discussion with my Japanese friends made me realize that, it is not that some Japanese people are not capable to writing perfectly understandable English tweets and articles, but it is the fear of public embarrassment when making a single mistake on the Internet, where everything is so open to the eyes of the world, and where published data is irreversible once it’s out in the wild. This psychology might be explained by 恥の文化 (the Shame Society).
Another thought is that Japanese corporates has fallen victim in the Internet social marketing strategy invented by the western world. In the North America, from giant corporates to local bakery and cafe, most of them now have at least one social network presence: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google…etc. Examples: a bakery tweets when fresh bun is just taken out of the oven. Dell and Comcast has dedicated customer service team to deal with angry tweets about their products and services (this article is written in 2008). Now when the younger generation in Japan are picking up the trendy social networks from the west, the Japanese companies has to follow the food and quickly set up their online presence, even if that means an ad-hoc integration of tweet translation to the existing public relation procedures.
As a consequence of such Internet social marketing strategy, the western corporates begin to hire Online Community Managers, who are special people dedicated to handle tweets, social networks, public discussions and blogs, and all kinds of PR to maintain the online corporate image. Even in the western world, such a kind of industry is still emerging and experimental. I will continue to observe how the Japanese corporates will move beyond ad-hoc tweet translations, and continue to evolve into similar dedicated community management concept.
Credit: the source tweet from which I learned about this service is posted by @HirokoTabuchi.
Related posts:
- myGengo Raised $583K USD From Angel Investors, Doing Human Tweet Translation
- “User Experience” – English/Chinese/Japanese UX Vocab
- SPAM Japanese Package – Luncheon Meat Sushi
- Tweeting in English? There’s a Book for That
- Self Service Newspaper Stand Pay by Octopus Card, Hong Kong
Pingback: myGengo Raised $583K USD From Angel Investors, Doing Human Tweet Translation
Thank you for your feedback. I will update my post to reflect the fact that it is Y3 per (Japanese) character.
I do understand that Japanese 文字／詞 (and similarly Chinese) can pack more meanings comparing to the same number of Latin characters. Your argument of the amount of translation work involved and hence the pricing is reasonable, but the idea that sending only 3 to 15 tweets a day to build/maintain a corporate’s online presence is not sufficient. Simply paying a professional translator to guarantee that the Japanese ツイート is translated in English with correct spelling and grammar is only a psychological safety net to the company boss. It’s like saying “hey look, we have twitter too” as an afterthought.
My vision, although might sound too ideal at the moment, is to encourage corporate Japan to deal with the root of managing online presence and nurturing the community, which means to have dedicated team handling online customers feedback on multiple social network channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, Mixi, major forums, what have you now or the future. This is a suggestion for the long run.
D’oh, I meant ‘charges Y3/character’ above instead of ‘Y3/word’ above.
Hi Calvin
Thanks for your post about Twiyaku.
Re: Pricing – it does sound expensive, however it actually ends up being a significant amount of text (especially if you remember those prices are based on translating from Japanese rather than from English).
Our service (which is at the lower end of the commercial translation cost scale) charges Y3/word (roughly) for translation of standard texts. If you look at translating 15 tweets/day @ 140 characters each you would be paying 15 x Y3 x 140, x 30 days = Y189,000 at full retail. So it’s a fair amount of money but it’s also a large amount of content and a tremendous value for the client.
Re: being “capable of translating emotion, attitude and tone of voice (happy, professional, angry, annoyed), as well as keeping a consistent presentation that reflects your corporate image.” – I think the point above implies the answer to this – you need to pay a fair amount to make this work. However it is possible and we think we do a good job at it.
Certainly our existing clients who have tweets translated are pretty happy about the quality – one of the reasons we announced the service
Cheers
Robert Laing (CEO of myGengo)