Crowdsourced website translation service Easyling wins How To Web Startup Challenge

Easyling, a service that allows website owners easily to serve up versions of their websites translated into foreign languages by humans, has won the Startup Challenge competition at How To Web in Bucharest, Romania.

The Hungarian startup impressed the judging panel with an elegant, innovative solution to a common problem. Easyling calls on a pool of around 18,000 translators to localize text on websites. The translation can then be inserted into the target website using a snippet of code.

Easyling charges $1 per 1000 views of translated pages and 5 US cents per translated word if the startup provides the translation work. Translators, working on a mechanical turk basis, take on and manage their tasks via a co-working platform. The startup wins two passes and a startup booth for The Next Web 2012 Conference in Amsterdam and a license for Adobe’s Business Catalyst service.

Second place in the competition went to Fonii, a service that provides visualizations of mobile phone bills. Third place went to SociaLook, which helps seek out the strongest connections between individuals by analysing online social data. One of the top three startups in the competition will be offered a place at the next Mini Seedcamp event.

As How To Web, draws to a close, the startup scene in this often under-reported region of Europe has had a real boost from a conference that attracted some of the continent’s best-known tech investors and entrepreneurs.