ReShare is targeted at news junkies who are tired of relying on Google Translate to read articles from foreign-language publications. Instead, the app offers articles translated into 11 languages by humans. The iOS and Android app was created by Conyac, a crowdsourcing translation platform.
After raising a total of $1.1 million to date, Conyac grew its base of translators from 10,000 to 17,000. That amount increased so rapidly that the Tokyo-based company didn’t have enough job requests for every person.
ReShare was created to give Conyac’s translators something to do so they wouldn’t move to a competing service, like One Hour Translation or Gengo. Translators will participate in a revenue-sharing program from money earned through ReShare’s in-app advertisements.
ReShare has translated news articles available in 11 languages: Japanese, English, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Indonesian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, French, Vietnamese, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean and Italian. All stories are picked, translated, and uploaded to the app by the translators, says Conyac founder Naoki Yamada.
While translations for Conyac’s clients are edited by second readers, I found that some of ReShare’s English-language articles had minor grammatical errors or were written in a more casual style than most news stories. Some language sections are still sparse. For example, Italian only has one article: a One Direction profile in Spanish.
Yamada says that his company plans to increase quality by doling out bonuses to translators based on how often their articles are shared to social networks. Another helpful feature would be to allow users to rate articles by readability.
There is already a wide range of stories from publications around the world, even though the ReShare only launched on iOS in March and on Android last week. Yamada says the app currently gets about 15 to 20 new articles per day in Japanese, while most other languages see about 5 to 10 new articles uploaded per day.
Yamada says that Conyac checked with lawyers to make sure that ReShare does not violate copyright laws. In the future, however, Conyac hopes to form revenue-sharing alliances with publishers to translate original content and publish it in different languages so it can be shared on social media networks around the world.
