Interesting. From a technical point of view, how does this work? Do you run texts through an automated system and then have real people proof read it afterwards?
They're farmed out piecewise to a pool of translators in the language pair. Say I had actually passed the Japanese to English translation test (which I didn't -- what can I say, must have been having a bad night, and I think I botched the heck out of a statement on the red tide's effect on productivity of fish stocks). I would log into myGengo, and there would be a list of J -> E translations awaiting completion, with titles. I could get the full text for one, get basically an editing lock on it (i.e. no one else is translating it while I am), and then after completion the customer reviews, accepts, and I get paid money.
This is optionally doable via API on the customer's side, which is a practical necessity for someone whose business was doing that transaction several hundreds or thousands of times per day. For example, you could imagine a major online retailer deciding "We'd like to offer all of our clothes to customers in the big six fashion markets, but drats, how to get 100k skus of descriptions of men's formalwear translated into six languages. AHA! We'll just build it into our CMS using the myGengo API."
As an aside, it seems their tests are very uneven. My Japanese is below 1-kyu level on the JLPT but I still managed to pass the Japanese to English test. However, I failed the English to Portuguese test twice, even though my native language is Portuguese and EN->PT is way easier for me than JP->EN.
This is optionally doable via API on the customer's side, which is a practical necessity for someone whose business was doing that transaction several hundreds or thousands of times per day. For example, you could imagine a major online retailer deciding "We'd like to offer all of our clothes to customers in the big six fashion markets, but drats, how to get 100k skus of descriptions of men's formalwear translated into six languages. AHA! We'll just build it into our CMS using the myGengo API."
Disclaimer: worked for them. They're cool folks.