Monday 3 September 2012

Scratching our itch

We started our project a few weeks ago that we hope will have some success. The project is really to scratch our own itch, and since we felt that it could be a useful service, others may want to use it as well.

The itch is the language barrier that we face when starting out in Germany. I think that it would be the same if the country was in France or Sweden. We just haven't got a good enough grasp of the language, and at my age, picking up the language is going to be difficult.

The further itch is to not just speak it, but also to read it. In particular, a document of some sort. The Germans love their document and everything have to be in order.

My initial scratcher began with my colleagues, then our neighbours when we were more familiar with them, but mostly it fell into Google Translate. As bad as it is, it did provide me with some information that act upon. Sometimes, getting Google Translate to make sense is a real battle. It is also tiresome having to type the document into it.

So my idea is to provide a service for a quick, off the cuff translation to be given. It will need to be returned within 48 hours, and it needs to be cheap. 

The technicality of it is for the document to photographed with the camera of a smart phone. The photo is then emailed to a specific address. Within 48hours, the translated document is returned.

I have just launched the beta program. check it out at launch.48translate.com and sign up to get a life time discount.