Update: We’ve definitely got enough Chinese translators so I am closing those applications. You should receive an e-mail from me shortly. If you want to translate Spanish, get in touch!
One thing that I’ve always found surprising is the amount of traffic this site gets from foreign language forums. There are big expat and migrant communities in the United States that often prefer to communicate in their mother language.
My language skills are lackluster at best, I can speak passable Spanish and some very basic French & a small amount of Thai (tonal languages are hard). I’d like to convert all of the content on this site into a number of different languages, unfortunately at the moment I don’t think that is feasible. Instead what I’d like to do is translate some of our more popular content into other languages.
Requirements
I’m looking for volunteers, actually volunteers is the wrong word because I’m willing to pay you (more on that later). To be eligible you’ll need to meet these requirements:
- Have some spare time.
- Be able to write a language fluently. Ideally this would be your first language, but I suspect I have a lot of intelligent readers that can speak multiple languages fluently.
- Be able to read English fluently (it’s no good being able to write Japanese fluently if you can’t understand my English to begin with).
Languages
To begin with I am looking to do this with the following languages:
- Spanish (Latin American)
- Chinese (simplified)
I’m also looking for ideas on what other languages to include in the future. What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments. I know for example there are large Filipino communities that speak Tagalog. German is also a popular one, but in general both of those communities usually speak English at a high level as well.
Payment
As I said, I don’t expect readers to do this work for free (good work should always be rewarded) – I also like to try and minimize my own risk. Here is what I am proposing: you translate the content and for ads that are served on that content you’ll receive 50% of the revenue. You don’t need to worry about researching, writing new content, servers or advertising partners you just need to deal with translations (I’ll even tell you the most popular articles to translate to give you a head start).
I have no idea how popular any of these foreign language translations will be, so you could make no money (in which case I’ll probably just give you some to say thanks for helping out) or you could make a lot. I’ll send payment either through Paypal or via Amazon giftcards, whichever you prefer.
How To Sign Up
If you’re interested in helping me out here is what to do:
- Use our contact us page to get in touch
- Let us know what language you’d like to convert into
- Let us know your experience with that language (e.g your Mom taught you it as a baby)
- Share what communities you’re a participant in (e.g Flyertalk is great, even better are communities that focus around that language)
- Share how you’d promote these new translations
Ideally I’d like to find one or two people for each language. Once I get a few interested people I’ll work out some way of seeing how good everybody is at translating and work from there, but for now I just want to make sure I can find some willing participants.
Final Thoughts
If you’re a regular reader that wants to read this site in English, don’t worry nothing will change. These translations will be on Doctorofcredit.com/es for example and won’t appear in your feedly or on this homepage or on our English twitter account.
If you speak another language and prefer to read in that language as well, hopefully you’ll be able to read some of our articles in that language (or share it with friends/family members). I hope to also have some language specific posts as well (like how about all of the Spanish credit card reconsideration numbers for example?) that will be truly new content.
What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments as well as what languages you’d like to see added and what articles you’d like to see translated.
