Brief Buck
Start a campaign
✦ Task type · Language work

Short-copy translation by people who live in the market

Machine translation is now good enough that the remaining failures are the expensive kind: fluent, confident, and wrong about register, idiom or law.

Post this taskThinking of taking one instead?

Translation stopped being about accuracy and started being about judgement. The machine gets the words; what it cannot get is whether the sentence is appropriate for the person reading it.

What to put in the public brief

Keep the copy itself private. Unreleased marketing text in a public brief is a leak with a price on it.

What to put in the private instructions

  1. Give the source text and say what it is for

    The same sentence translates differently for a push notification, a landing page and a terms page.

  2. State the register explicitly

    Formal or informal address is a decision, not a detail, and in several languages there is no neutral option to fall back on.

  3. Name what must not be translated

    Brand names, product names, and any string that appears in code. A translated variable name is a bug.

  4. Ask them to flag rather than smooth

    "Tell me anything that is fine in English and awkward here" is the question that finds the expensive problems.

Proof worth requiring

Ask for

The translated text, a short note on any choice they made deliberately, and their market — the country they live in, not only the language they speak.

Do not ask for

A certification or a qualification. For short marketing copy the useful credential is living in the market this month, and requiring credentials filters for the wrong thing while raising the price.

When this task type is the wrong tool

If the text is legal, medical or financial, this is not the right instrument and the saving is not worth it. Use a professional service with liability attached.

If you need the whole product localised rather than a block of copy, localisation services covers the difference between the two, and it is larger than it looks.

Common questions

Why not just use machine translation?

For gist, use it. The failures that survive machine translation are the ones that read perfectly: a formal register where the market expects informal, an idiom that lands oddly, a claim that is ordinary in one jurisdiction and regulated in another. Those cost more to find in production than to catch here.

Should I ask for translation or review?

Review is usually better value. Run the machine output first, then pay a native speaker to correct it and flag what they changed and why. You get the correction and the reasoning, and the reasoning is what stops you making the same mistake in the next string.

What reward is fair?

Eight to twenty dollars for a short block, up to a few hundred words. Price by scarcity of the language rather than word count: a Romanian reviewer and a Japanese reviewer are not the same market, and paying the same for both means one of them declines.

How do I check quality without speaking the language?

Ask for a back-translation of three lines you choose after they submit, and a note on anything they deliberately did not translate literally. Both are cheap, and a translator who cannot explain a choice usually did not make one.

Thinking of taking this task?

The same job, from the other side. Rewards are set by the poster, so treat these as the range this task type usually sits in rather than a promise.

Usually pays
$8 to $20 per short block
You need
First-language fluency and current residence in the market
Proof expected
The translated text plus notes on anything you changed deliberately

Living in the market this month matters more than any certificate. Flag what is technically correct but reads oddly; that is the expensive thing to find.

Create a worker account

Brief a translation

Set the reward, the languages and the number of spots. Workers who speak the language reserve a spot; your copy stays private until they do.

Post this task