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Finnish startup Transfluent raises $1 million for social media translations


Skift Take

Transfluent is one of several similar translation services, but its human freelancers are a key selling point to a business that would rather rely on a native speaker than an automated translation.

Fully-automated online translation is one of the oldest cloud-based services out there (I’m thinking Babelfish in the late Nineties), but nonetheless it remains one of the most obviously incomplete.

One particularly interesting company in this space is Transfluent, which is applying a similar model to social media, websites and smartphone apps… The company, which has 15,000 freelancers working in 60 languages, is itself Finnish, but the founders are about to relocate to New York. What’s more, they’ve just picked up $1m in angel funding to set up that office, and have also opened an office in Singapore.

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