9540 users of a product that was conceived less than two months ago

We have now added in the professionally verified versions of Spanish and Arabic, and translators are working on the German, French and Japanese versions of Learnit. I am looking forward to having a dedicated landing page for each of these languages on the site. Presently users who do not speak English are having difficulty registering on the widget. Some instructions in their native language will be a great help.

Over the last couple of days we have also added a link to the code so people can insert the widget in their own web site, and we’ve introduced some new BETA languages - including Latin & Welsh. We are working on the payment module, so people can listen to English & Spanish pronunciation. For the first time, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking ‘what if it doesn’t work… what if nobody is willing to buy in’, but my last dream of the night was people using Learnit to prepare for the Olympics - so it’s all swings & roundabouts in my head at the moment!

Organising translators has been a learning curve. I introduced a test in the job description after it became clear that people did not understand what I was saying in the advert, very simply: if you send me an email, please title it “translator query”. I was astounded that 95% of those who contacted me failed this very basic test of comprehension. And there were so many avoidable errors in emails from people sending me their CV’s (rather than a response to the translation test I had requested).

Here are some extracts from the first few lines of emails from various translators contacting us about working on the project:

“Quality is mush more important than speed, in my opinion” ” Please find hereunder my resume for your consideration” ” I have high translation diploma exp. 16 yrs six …regars” ”I am A qualified and professional translator ” “I hope you more success” “I am looking for joining your teamwork” “an we are interested in the task you have” “I master Arabic and Enlgish” ” I am intrested for proofreading job”  They did not inspire much confidence.