Kintoun
AI-powered translation that preserves document layout
My blog post, titled "Lessons From Building a Translator App That Beats Google Translate and DeepL," was posted by someone on Hacker News, and somehow, it made it to the front page.
In just one day, the exposure brought 5,800 visitors to my humble blog and over 1,000 visitors to kintoun.ai!
Honestly, I did put some thought into how to write the post. My initial idea was that instead of simply promoting the product, which can feel like an ad and turn people off, I should focus on the lessons I learned while building it. I used Kintoun.ai as an example to keep it concrete and helpful.
Turns out, that approach worked!
Going forward, I'll try to shift my mindset: think first about how to make what I've done useful to others.
I recently built a document translator app called Kintoun (https://kintoun.ai), and to my surprise, it ended up outperforming Google Translate and DeepL in several cases. I wrote a blog post to share what I learned while building and launching it.
The original post is on my blog: https://dingyu.me/blog/lessons-translator-app-beats-google-translate-deepl. Since Indie Hackers doesn't support images, I'll just include the key points here.
If you want to see the full post with examples and screenshots, feel free to check it out.
Here are the main takeaways:
Surprise: my app is actually better than Google Translate and DeepL
Product distribution is as important as product development
Inertia + Svelte is awesome
I live abroad and deal with multiple languages every day. Like many people, I've been using ChatGPT to translate, but it has a couple of issues:
It often cuts off and doesn't translate the whole file
It completely breaks the document's formatting
So I built a simple tool for myself that could do full document translation and preserve the layout. I ran it on my home Linux PC at first. It worked surprisingly well — my wife even started using it for work. She told me it was better than the expensive service her company uses.
Therefore, I redesigned the UI and put it online.
Some things I think are cool:
1. It keeps the layout — tables, fonts, bold text, images etc. See my app (Kintoun) vs DeepL:
2. You can guide the translation — like “make this more polite” or “use simpler words”:
3. It supports phonetic text — e.g. Japanese ruby text is handled properly (Google Translate doesn't know how to translate those. DeepL does, but can't keep the format as I do):
Please checkout the website for more features:
I'm still beta testing, so it's free for now.
Would love any feedback — especially from people who work in multiple languages!
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Kintoun sounds like a brilliant tool! If you’re ever looking for a smart, translation-themed logo that captures the essence of your app, I’d love to work with you on that.
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Thank you.
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Really like what you’ve built! Adding support for PDFs would make it even more useful. Wishing you the best of luck with future development!
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Thank you for your kind words! I'll add PDF support once there's more traction.
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