CEO experiments crowd-sourced translation

Simon Lee, founder and CEO of Flitto

By Yun Suh-young

Currently, there are a plethora of companies that offer online translation services and programs as the Korean language becomes more integrated in international business and culture.

One such firm is Flitto, which takes full advantage of the instantaneous communication available through the Internet and social media.

Flitto has been finding significant demand for its services, which it claims are faster and more accurate compared to those offered by rivals. The company, which launched a translation service in 2012, says it now has 2.5 million users from 170 countries.

Flitto was the winner of the ``Startup 2013” award given by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning and also named as the winner of Seedstars World, a global startup competition, held in Geneva, Switzerland, earlier this year.

Flitto’s business model, developed by chief executive Simon Lee, is simple. A user types in words or phrases that need translation on Flitto and other users around the world respond. For a simple sentence, the process takes only a minute, Lee said. Users who provide the most accurate translations receive points, which are then used as virtual currency on the company’s separate online shopping service.

“Until now, because people didn’t really know what our service was, entering startup competitions was a good way to promote ourselves. Now we’ve set our goal higher. We want to become a translation service that comes first to people’s mind,” Lee, 32, said.

“Google translation is the most well-known translation service, but it has been unable to shake inaccuracy issues. Nobody uses Google for translating business documents. We believe we can outdo Google in this field.

``Flitto is a great way to make money with your free time. While you’re sitting in the toilet, you can utilize the time efficiently by translating and earning points. With the points, you can later buy items from our e-commerce store.”

While people might be suspicious about the credibility of a crowd-sourced model, Lee claims that the outcomes are reliable. The user will be send his or her request to several hundred people at a time and are then provided with various results that can be compared.

The translators’ credibility is judged by accuracy, speed, frequency of translated items, and how often their material is selected by users. The merit of the service is that it’s cheap and anyone can be a translator and anyone can make a request.

“People participate in translation despite the low compensation because it’s a way of utilizing their language abilities. Asians tend to respond to material compensation more than Europeans. So for our European users, we’ve offered to donate water to African nations for their translations. They responded more positively to this cause,” Lee said.

Lee will be leaving for meetings in Kenya and Nigeria this month to negotiate a distribution process with organizations there.

The usage of the service has expanded from translating comments of Korean ``hallyu” stars to business letters. Flitto now offers a new service, social commerce translation, which makes it easier for global users to buy products at a cheaper price through social commerce.

“Most of the social commerce sites operate only in their languages. If they register their sites at Flitto, our users will translate their product information for them, allowing global users to access the local sites and buy local products,” said Lee.

“The sites, however, will selectively expose products catered to the taste of global customers.”

The company also released an upgraded version of the application this week that remedies its shortcomings. Until now, Flitto’s translation service had been quite difficult to use for first-time users because the website and application didn’t offer guided explanations on how to use the service.

The company recently opened a branch office in Silicon Valley, California, and plans to open an office in China next month.

Lee says he feels rewarded in creating value.

“When people give us positive feedbacks, we feel delighted that we’re doing something valuable. We could go out of business anytime but that doesn’t matter. The fact that we’re realizing our dreams and creating value for people is what motivates us to keep going,” he said.