opinion Translate.com sold for $853,000

Great value for the buyer

Great sale, I used only google translate

Bohdan said:

This service was designed for another purpose. Consider, you have some kind of international business or media portal and you want to increase the count of your world-wide visitors. So you could use this service for translating your content. They use ML as the first iteration and then native speakers correct automatically translated content.

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Exactly! Check out weglot. ML translations for websites with human translators to touch up errors. Translate.com would be the ultimate domain for this service.

Windoms said:

Google, companies, governments, any field. English, spanish, italian, portuguese, dutch, russian, thai, malay, anywhere in the world, the list goes on and on. Fast and accurate translation is critical to everyday business. Companies can't afford to do it themselves and everything needs to be formal and accurate so they must rely on companies that offer professional translation services.

Multi billion $/year business. No big company owns the market. The biggest company is transperfect 90 cities worldwide 600million$/year revenue which represents only 2% market share. Many companies with revenues in the hundreds of millions. The problem is trust needs to be built so companies cant send all kinds of documents to one mainstream online translation website, cant happen. Upwork has a lot of translation jobs, but its small jobs. Large companies dont deal with upwork.

The domain alone is worth the million.

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That's right. Transperfect is #1. But Unbabel.com is breathing down its neck. Started by 3 friends in Portugal, Unbabel uses AI to provide actionable data to human translators. Already is making millions USD, and formed partnerships with Microsoft and Salesforce.com.
Unbabel will be a billion dollar company soon. Or get acquired by a giant company.

Globally, the business of professional translation is a multi billion dollar business - In Denmark, where I live, there is a startup called EasyTranslate and they have just won a translation assignment over 4 years for the Ministry of Justice worth almost $100 million and that's only a small part of their business. Many common people use google translate, but it's not good enough for professional use and in that light, I think the price is too low

There may be problems with the action because Flippa auction lists Bidder #2 as a banned account; that bidder went all the way up to $852,000 dollars during the auction:

Source: https://domaingang.com/domain-news/...nt-for-greek-entrepreneur-anthos-chrysanthou/

wwwulff said:

Globally, the business of professional translation is a multi billion dollar business - In Denmark, where I live, there is a startup called EasyTranslate and they have just won a translation assignment over 4 years for the Ministry of Justice worth almost $100 million and that's only a small part of their business. Many common people use google translate, but it's not good enough for professional use and in that light, I think the price is too low

There may be problems with the action because Flippa auction lists Bidder #2 as a banned account; that bidder went all the way up to $852,000 dollars during the auction:

Source: https://domaingang.com/domain-news/...nt-for-greek-entrepreneur-anthos-chrysanthou/

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Nice find, Mr. Kierkegaard. It seems like it's always either (a nice sale) or (something is rotten in Denmark)
Denmark is one of my favorite countries -- great place to live and enjoy the hygge

Windoms said:

Companies use that service a lot.

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Companies may use translators a lot, but not translate,com - it has just 40 paying clients after 4 years operating !

wwwulff said:

Flippa auction lists Bidder #2 as a banned account

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Whilst it's not uncommon to have an "anonymous" account for high-value purchases so the seller doesnt know who the bidder is until the escrow payment stages, that one does look very "shill-like"

bodes well for my recent acquisition

TranslateTool

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YairDD said:

They sold it too cheap imo.

Only the domain itself worth around the sale price. and the website is known and generates almost $30k revenue a month...
I would say $1.5m is what it's worth.

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And that is why you don't sell it on Flippa.

For me it's a good sale for buyer supposing that US$30,000/month figure is net income and it is real.

Only the domain name alone is worth a good chunk of money.

Even if I don't give much importance to the domain names anymore...

You can have Translate or SomethingSomethingTransate, as long as you show me the money, that's fine

.X. said:

I wouldn't think a high bounce rate

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I would guess 99% of visitors were looking for the google translate tool, hence the high bounce rate.

wwwulff said:

Globally, the business of professional translation is a multi billion dollar business - In Denmark, where I live, there is a startup called EasyTranslate and they have just won a translation assignment over 4 years for the Ministry of Justice worth almost $100 million and that's only a small part of their business. Many common people use google translate, but it's not good enough for professional use and in that light, I think the price is too low

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100% Agreed! I sold two hand reg domains to one Translation company each for XXXX. I was confused why this company buy my hand reg domains for XXXX when Google is daddy in this niche. But when I checked their website I realized that Translation is huge and billion dollar business. Its not just limited to checking word or one sentence in Google Translate. Amazing thing is Google itself is client of that company.

It's a neat deal. Congratulations to the buyer and seller!

A little off topic, but my wife previously worked for Google doing translations internally for legal documents and some other company related documents. She also worked as a contractor for them for a year as an ads quality rater, basically translating their ads for Brazil to make sure they made sense. I kind of found it all ironic and as if they didn't trust their own translations.

I'm thinking this domain/site would be better off being used for providing services that require translating documents, especially longer ones which they could charge big bucks for each time. This is assuming that Google wasn't the one's who actually bought it.

LeapNames said:

A little off topic, but my wife previously worked for Google doing translations internally for legal documents and some other company related documents. She also worked as a contractor for them for a year as an ads quality rater, basically translating their ads for Brazil to make sure they made sense. I kind of found it all ironic and as if they didn't trust their own translations.

I'm thinking this domain/site would be better off being used for providing services that require translating documents, especially longer ones which they could charge big bucks for each time. This is assuming that Google wasn't the one's who actually bought it.

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Translation tools can only help translating words.
When you translate a text from English into another language, you need to convey the same meaning along with expressions, sarcasm etc.. You need a human who is knowledgeable in both languages to do that.
Take legal translation. There's legal english terms that you need to translate into spanish legal terms. You need a translator who is knowledgeable into both english and spanish legal systems to do a proper job, not just someone who is going to use a dictionary and google translate tool. This is why you can't have one company or website own the market. You need trust. Translation companies who in turn work with professional and certified translators, non-disclosure agreements and all. They get paid the highest rates.

65% of translation can be done by any person fluent in two languages, but the remaining 35%, the rhetoric, synthax and all the very important & critical stuff that conveys the same message can only be achieved by a professional and trained ''letterperson'', experienced in whatever field he/she is working.

Sharp & professional translation is like an eternal commodity. For that reason alone I see no value in the business or whatever they have built, I only see the domain.

LeapNames said:

A little off topic, but my wife previously worked for Google doing translations internally for legal documents and some other company related documents. She also worked as a contractor for them for a year as an ads quality rater, basically translating their ads for Brazil to make sure they made sense. I kind of found it all ironic and as if they didn't trust their own translations.

I'm thinking this domain/site would be better off being used for providing services that require translating documents, especially longer ones which they could charge big bucks for each time. This is assuming that Google wasn't the one's who actually bought it.

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I hope we find out soon if the buyer is an end-user.
I don't think Google purchased it, as the company usually doesn't purchase premium generic domains. These companies do: Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com and Amazon.
Unbabel.com could have bought it, as the company recently had a nice funding round, and there are a few human translation companies that already have "Babel" as a moniker for their company brand(s).
Then again, it could have been purchased by a domain investor for the name alone. We'll see.

nametrekker said:

I hope we find out soon if the buyer is an end-user.
I don't think Google purchased it, as the company usually doesn't purchase premium generic domains. These companies do: Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com and Amazon.
Unbabel.com could have bought it, as the company recently had a nice funding round, and there are a few human translation companies that already have "Babel" as a moniker for their company brand(s).
Then again, it could have been purchased by a domain investor for the name alone. We'll see.

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I agree I highly doubt it was Google.

Give it some time, with a proper AI integration, the website will get much more attention from companies (who don't use G.T). I still think the price is low IMO

Any details about the buyer? I saw the listing on Flippa a while ago but didn't follow the entire sale.

I had been relying on siegemedia.com for relative keyword data;

and it looked, a year ago, as if TRANSLATE was about to overtake

WEATHER as the number one keyword; then siegemedia.com

changes/refines their approach; now WEATHER 24,440,000 - MAPS

20,400,000 - TRANSLATE 18,310,000 - so TRANSLATE looks like it goes

from "almost" being number one all the way down to number three ! But then,

TAYLOR SWIFT is number 61 and BEYONCE is not even in their top 100 !

And tied with MELANIA TRUMP !

The seller was probably risk averse, and the domain comprised too large a %

of their net worth. Great investment for any buyer with deep pockets ( very

large net worth ) at that price - the domain was probably developed to enable

the realization of a good selling price.

Everything is Relative in a world with no Absolutes.....

otismo said:

I had been relying on siegemedia.com for relative keyword data;

and it looked, a year ago, as if TRANSLATE was about to overtake

WEATHER as the number one keyword; then siegemedia.com

changes/refines their approach; now WEATHER 24,440,000 - MAPS

20,400,000 - TRANSLATE 18,310,000 - so TRANSLATE looks like it goes

from "almost" being number one all the way down to number three ! But then,

TAYLOR SWIFT is number 61 and BEYONCE is not even in their top 100 !

And tied with MELANIA TRUMP !

The seller was probably risk averse, and the domain comprised too large a %

of their net worth. Great investment for any buyer with deep pockets ( very

large net worth ) at that price - the domain was probably developed to enable

the realization of a good selling price.

Everything is Relative in a world with no Absolutes.....

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Interesting, thanks.

I can see Lionbridge buying this.

mawels said:

Great sale, I used only google translate

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For personal use or official use as well .
Google can help you alot but there is no alternate of human tanslation services like LENTRAX Translation Services.