Translation Platform Fluently.io Runs Out of Cash, Closes Down

 

From Slator

 

 

London-based translation platform Fluently is closing shop. The company ran out of cash after it failed to secure follow-up funding to a September 2015 seed round. Fluently was an online translation platform that sought to automate away the project management part of the supply chain. In a feature on translation startups earlier this year, we said about Fluently that market matching is intriguing but needs to prove it works at scale.

 

The company was founded in early 2015 by language industry veteran Karin Nielsen (thebigword, Codex), and developer Giovanni Charles. Fluently’s product was in private beta, but the company had signed up 2,000 translators and was generating tens of thousands of pounds in revenue, according to founder Nielsen, to whom Slator spoke for this article.

 

Minimal Human Interaction

 

In part, Fluently relied on clients’ willingness to manage their own projects, and on translators open to completing jobs with minimal human interaction.

 

The way Fluently works is clients log in, drag and drop files, and then get an instant wordcount, translation memory leverage, and a quote. They then go through a briefing screen, where, using a slider, they are able to select, for example, what style they prefer (formal, informal, etc.) and pick the translator’s area of expertise.

 

After clients choose from among the matched translators served up by Fluently’s algorithm, they are required to pay upfront. Payment is done through the platform and the funds are held in escrow until the translation is delivered.

 

Execution Falls Short

 

At its core, Fluenty’s vision was much bigger than cutting out the project manager. “What we were ultimately looking at was building this really massive, high quality, multilingual dataset,” Nielsen said.

 

At the core of the product was a matching algorithm based not only on data provided by the translator during signup, but also gathered from a linguist’s Twitter and Facebook profiles.

 

The goal was to demographically profile linguists with such rigor that the product would become better at predicting which translator was the ideal match for a particular job.

 

原文：

https://slator.com/industry-news/translation-platform-fluently-runs-out-of-cash-closes-down/