Translation startup pulls off the ultimate pivot… to porn

As you watch your favorite adult films – I particularly enjoy My Dinner With Andre – I suspect you often wonder how foreign porn dialogue (“Yur kumberbund haz gefallent unto minna lutefisk,” for example) is translated, dubbed, or subtitled properly (“Take me now, you hunk of fermented fish,” in this example.)

Well now you know. After visiting an adult show in Prague two friends from Bratislava, Slavomir and Pavel, pivoted their original company, LocalizationGuru, to Adult-Translations.com. The SFW site allows porn creators to translate their ads quickly and easily into multiple languages and they work with some of the bigger sites including Flirt4Free and the musically-named WankzVR.

They began translating for adult companies in October 2015 and have since done 64 translations. Perhaps you’ve seen one of their products?

“This year we are launching a new integration with a large affiliate network in the adult niche which enables publishers to translate their ads with only a few clicks,” said Slavomir who preferred to use only his first name. “What differentiates us from other players that we are not only a translation company but also a tech company. We can integrate ourselfs into the platforms of our customer. They can also upload their documents to the platform, get an instant quote and follow their whole order online.”

“The project started as a freelance platform for translators in February 2015. We started building a platform to eliminate the need of clients to go to translation agencies (the middle man) and go directly to the source. We raised a small round of 30K euro from CEED tech and built the platform. We had a small traction of a few hundred euros a month but was not enough to sustain the project,” he said. “Having the last 1K on the bank account we bought 2 tickets to an adult show in Prague, since we had 1 customer from the adult industry, we thought we might find some more there. The first day all our business cards were gone, about 400 of them. So we realized there is potential in this market.”

Slavomir said he gets a lot of “repetitive content” and wants to automate as much of the translation as possible. “By focusing on a niche market we get an edge over competitors who focus on all kinds of companies in different industries.”

The business post-pivot seems to be erupting and doing surprisingly well and numbers are rising pneumatically. It’s clear that the adult market is clearly underserved and anyone who can give adult producers a hand is a welcome addition to the gang. While I realize that many of us may never see what these lads are translating its nice to know that “Ich spritze” in German will be faithfully translated into “Madam, I sincerely enjoyed our rendezvous at church and hope to ask your father’s permission to call on you on the morrow.”