ArcticStartup covered PremiumFanPage back in January when it was launched at the CES ‘11. The venture is the brainchild of Jani Penttinen, CEO and founder of XIHA Life and is based on XIHA’s multilingual social media platform. This means your content on numerous social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, blogs can amalgamate at one single fan site via a platform that offers real time translation.
I am a staunch believer in using a native language when it comes to addressing or targeting a particular region. It is bound to increase your exposure and more people actually find it more fruitful to make use of your service. PremiumFanPage takes the burden of doing the translations for you in a very professional manner. We received an update from Jani recently that highlighted the progress of his latest venture.
PFP is building up its reseller networks in the US region as well as partnering with a few design companies, one of them being Bolder in Helsinki (we’re also working with Bolder Helsinki on Arctic15). There is quite some work for PFP in the pipeline, so much that they have actually turned down a few customers recently. The issues are largely associated to not having enough resources/bandwidth to get the job done and this is quite largely due to the fact that no one at PFP might have thought of the venture doing this good so early after the launch. More updates include that PFP is not just limited to doing human translated fan pages but has included direct translations of Twitter feeds as well as Facebook pages. This is different as PFP doesn’t require companies to use their hosted sites.
The example of this is Microtask tweets. The account’s tweets are directly translated into French language by a professional translator and all it takes is a minor period to repost the same to the @microtask_fr handle. The feature is only a week old and has already managed to get a decent following amongst the French speaking population. This stands evidence to the fact that using a native language works splendidly as everyone wants content to be available in a language that they better understand.
Jani also clarified the worry which many people or customers may have with PFP. The major being their mistrust with translation services on the Internet and the confusion with automatic translations. He stated:
Most people assume that because it’s all automated, the translations are machine-made, which is not the case at all. When I mention it’s based on crowd-sourced translator networks, some people still remain suspicious as crowd-sourcing is often associated with people volunteering some stuff on their spare time. On the contrary, we work with networks of professional translators, and our customers can expect the same professional quality they would get from a traditional translation company.
