Babel Mail

Hi everyone, We built Babel Mail after having to deal with the hassle of existing translation services, which require you to send your text, get it back, and then paste it into your email before sending. With Babel Mail, you can write in your language, send it off, and we'll automatically translate your email on the way to your recipient. Replies get translated back to your language, so the entire experience feels as seamless as talking to someone in your own language. We use a mix of machine translation APIs and human proofing to keep costs low. I'd be more than happy to answer questions. Would love to get feedback, testers, and, of course, talk to people that love language and language technologies! Andrew @ Babel Mail

Clever, @andrewjiang! I can see this being valuable for customer support but it could also be packaged into a "pen pal" product to enable people across cultures and languages to communicate. This would be fun to experiment. Riffing here: 1) Once a week users are prompted to answer a specific question (e.g. What did you do today? What was your favorite childhood toy? 2) Users reply via email (a la StoryWorth cc @nickbaum), Babel Mail translates the message to another language, and delivers it to someone else across the world (a la Rando cc @millsustwo) 3) The sender also receives the response from the same person and a thread is opened up between the two individuals to continue the conversation. Could be a fun way to learn about other cultures, encourage empathy, and connect people across the world. Anyway, back to you, Andrew. :) Who did you build Babel Mail for and what use cases do you foresee?

What an interesting use case @rrhoover! We've had at least a couple requests for an API to connect with existing messaging / forum / communication services, but that is definitely the most fun use case I've heard to date. I built Babel Mail for startups and small business owners looking to do business in other countries (finding partners and manufacturers, getting market information, etc.) and expand support to customers that speak foreign languages. You'll no longer have to hire a Chinese speaking customer service representative if you want to sell to China - just respond directly with Babel Mail. My favorite is use case is for myself. As a first generation immigrant, I've lost meaningful communication with my grandparents due to my grade-level Chinese writing abilities (don't worry, our translators are experts!). In building this, I wanted to be able to tell them about my life and hear about theirs without losing substance and nuance due to language challenges. I'd be interested to hear what the Product Hunt community has to say about other use cases :)

Are you using different translators for each direction? For instance English goes through a Chinese native speaker to China and Chinese goes through an English native speaker back to USA? Do you need any more translators? I know someone…

Hi @munsonbh! Usually, we pass the translations through 3 people. In your example, we have 1 person who is more fluent in English than Chinese do the initial pass through, then a person who is more fluent in Chinese than English do the second pass through, then a member of our team do a final look through. If you know people who would be great translators, please send them through (andrew@babel-mail.com) - I'd definitely like to speak with them.

This reminds me a lot of Unbabel, that was featured here on PH about a month back: http://www.producthunt.co/posts/... Very interesting space. Unbabel also does email translations and are planning integrations with Gmail and other platforms. And you got very similar names too - not sure who started out first, but be careful with potential trademark issues here.

Very cool. I could see us integrating something like this into StoryWorth. Sometimes grandparents prefer to write stories in their native tongue, but their grandkids don't speak it.