Translation Services USA Unveils Ackuna.com

February 19, 2011 (PRLEAP.COM) Technology News
Translation Services USA is proud to announce the launch of their subsidiary company, Ackuna.com. Currently a leading global provider of professional translations, the team at Translation Services USA created Ackuna in response to the increasing demand for more accurate machine translations. Harnessing the power of Google Translate, the Facebook community, crowdsourced and crowdvoted translations, and an extensive archive of professional translations produced by Translation Services USA, the Ackuna translator is improving upon translation results at an exponential rate and raising global expectations for machine translation.

Ackuna is a free crowdsourced translation tool that enables a community of users to vote and/or contribute better translations, acting as a mass filtering system for translations. This crowdsourcing platform applied to the Ackuna translator increases quality control and the overall value of translations by giving users the option to revise translations in accordance to their language preferences, as well as being able to vote on the most relevant version of a specific phrase.

In addition to the benefits of crowdsourcing, Ackuna.com derives additional revised translation results from their extensive translation memory bank, including 10+ years worth of archived professional translations obtained from established translation company, Translation Services USA. Serving as the foundation for Ackuna, the translation memory bank will initially provide the Ackuna translator with an already substantial catalog of introductory revisions.

For years, the expense of professional translations has often exceeded the necessity for accuracy, as if to imply that professional translations were only meant for large companies and people with big pockets. Ackuna aims to redefine translation industry standards by challenging the commonly overpriced, all-or-nothing cost structure. Most professional translators require a minimum fee of $50+ to translate or proofread. With free membership and eliminating the timely process of sorting through freelancers, project management and invoicing, the Ackuna translator provides users the option to have translations proofread at a reasonable, and much more affordable, rate of $.06/per word. In addition, users are only charged for unique sentences. If the text submitted for proofreading contains any phrase repetition or already exists within the translation memory bank, Ackuna automatically deducts it from the total cost.

Ackuna has a sharp, minimalist design and is extremely user-friendly. The simple-looking interface is a great departure from other free translators, which are often crowded with ads, misleading tabs and other various unrelated links. Reminiscent of early Google, the home page features a simple search box for users to enter their text, after which the database separates the text into segments and translates them accordingly. The translation with the highest number of votes will serve as the displayed result. If there is no pre-existing match, the results will be provided by Google Translate. Similar to the collaborative structure of Quora, users have the ability to vote "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" for translations, as well as having the option to submit their own alternative versions of the translations. The results are calculated and permanently stored in the database.

Ackuna will not only improve the quality of translations, but will also help to increase the speed at which projects can be translated, proofread and finalized. On average, a professional translator can produce up to 2,000 words per day. With higher throughput, the Ackuna translator can scale and produce 100,000+ translated and proofread words per day. Upon the first weekend after Ackuna's unofficial launch the site received over 500,000 translation requests, an impressive introduction to say the least.