Flipping tweets – translation service for social media savvy businesses

PHUKET: Following an extensive period of beta testing, a Chiang Mai-based tech startup’s new translation service, Fliplingo, went live on June 26.

The company, also called Fliplingo, has searched out a distinct niche in the translation market by offering live translation of Twitter messages in – as of this time – up to 32 languages. That’s right, actual multilingual human beings somewhere out in the ether will read your tweets, translate them and post them.

“Before we started developing Fliplingo, when we were at the idea validation stage, we completed a series of face-to-face interviews with potential customers. This allowed us to really understand what customers expected Fliplingo to do for them,” Fliplingo founder Matthieu Aussaguel told The Nation.

So what does Fliplingo do for them? Once the quick account setup process is complete, it can be configured so tweets are automatically fired over to Fliplingo which then translates them into the requested language and posts the message. They call the process a flip.

It is easy to see how this service can benefit a business. Picture a resort in, say, Phuket which wants to send tantalizing tweets to potential customers in, say, Korea or Russia. Fliplingo affords businesses another avenue to extend their brand awareness into new markets globally.

A thoughtful quality of Fliplingo is that it is more than a one-size-fits-all service. For instance, they offer two levels of translation depending on the client’s needs and budget. Instantaneous machine translation is also available as a free service for circumstances where perfect accuracy or tone aren’t paramount.

When Fliplingo customers are paying the US$0.07 per word charge, they can expect “a 99.9% satisfaction rate”, an average translation time of 15 minutes and perfect formatting, as well as whatever revisions or edits are necessary to complete that masterpiece tweet.

Customers can also relay specific instructions to the translator to maintain a tone of voice or clarify a term or idiom that may otherwise get lost in translation.

Payment is based on a credit scheme where users charge up their accounts and the cost of the tweets is automatically deducted. Accounts can be set to automatically top-up so crucial tweeting opportunities are not lost.

Fliplingo offers a variety of other features such as a simplified one-page interface to help facilitate a painless Twitter translation experience; a “Followers Language Analysis” to help target tweets; and a dashboard that shows the journey your tweets have taken.

If it sounds like something that your business or organization could benefit from, head over to their website at fliplingo.com.

— Jeremie Schatz