Freelance linguistic marketplace 2Polyglot: the history of creating

Andrew Prudko shares his personal experience of launching international online platform 2Polyglot, which is oriented on linguistic freelancers.

The idea of creating an international linguistic platform did not appeared without purpose. As it always happens, at first, it emerges some kind of issue requiring solution and then you realize that it would be great if it this solution was a little easier and more comfortable, but you are obliged to get along on existing ways. So as we had the need to translate the website of our marketing company to different languages. But, unfortunately, in our team there were no polyglots, so we thought, “Hm-m, what if to create our own, but digital one”?

Actually, that’s how it usually works: there is a common issue, which needs solving and if you manage to solve it, you will have a successful business.

We faced an issue, which was in the fact that we had to browse through different multipurpose freelance services in order to find a convenient translator. And that usually leads to time wasting. Therefore, we started our search for a specialized marketplace where we could find a freelancer, but we did not manage to get one. Most of them have plenty of specialists’ types such as designers, programmers and so on, though the necessary one was absent.

We have realized that a lot of people and companies, which need services of translation, actually face the same issue every day. We have made a research and received data turned out to be quite interesting. According to American research company “Common Sense Advisory”, a market of world linguistic services is dynamically emerging. Furthermore, in 2014 $73 billion was spent for translation services; 1.5 million professional translators exist on Earth; rate of translation specialists increase will be 42% till the end of 2020 and 15% will be the rate of translation market increase till the end of the same year.

From this moment, we have decided that freelance linguists deserve separate platform and their profiles should not be lost among plenty of accounts of IT-specialists. Then another quite difficult task appeared, which required creative approach – choosing the right brand name. As platform is linguistic and connected with languages, then our website had to show that it possessed foreign languages knowledge. So at once the word “polyglot” emerged by itself. But the thing is that obviously, such domain name was already taken. The decision could be only in adding one word more, which could make the project name too complicated or a digit instead of a word, i.e. “four” sounding similar to “for”. But the research showed that this digit had a doubtful reputation in China, because Chinese “four” sounds similar to “death” in Chinese. Furthermore, they even often replace fourth floor fascia in hotels with “3a” or simple “F”. This tetraphobia (phobia of the 4 digit) influenced all areas of Chinese life, so we decided to express our respect towards Chinese culture taking into account that the project is international and access to Chinese market is important to us. That is why we stopped at “2” digit having decided to turn “2” into a globe on our logo confirming we work in the entire world.

From this moment the official work on creating new platform for freelance translators, copywriters, language tutors and tour guides reached its origin. Step by step website was developed and on the 24-th of March in 2015 the platform was officially launched in two languages: English and Russian. It does not look like a real polyglot, right? Anyway, it was only the first day, so as it is said, to be continued.

Then we faced an issue of choosing a convenient electronic payment system and this topic can be another separate post, because of too many details. I will only say that in the end we have chosen PayPal as other different payment systems had conditions, which did not fit our interests, i.e. high rates of fees, absence of possibility to keep money on the system without sending to a bank account and so on.

Since we have launched 2Polyglot, we have created 4 versions.., excuse me, “F” versions of the service in English, Russian, French and Ukrainian. By the way, we did not hesitate to make much translation work on the site having used services of executors registered on it. So our users helped us to develop our marketplace and we proved the necessity of this project by our own example. More than 3 thousand linguistic freelancers have registered on the site with total traffic of 25,000 visits per month since March. And this is only for “3a” months after launch! I believe that qualified services of language area will soon be associated with our platform and all who need to find freelance work will come 2 Polyglot.