ProZ.com Blog

The vote buttons are not a placebo! They work!

In the current translation contest, Benevolent deception: The placebo button effect, some language pairs are in the Qualifications phase. For these language pairs, participants can provide ratings for Quality of writing and for Accuracy of translation next to each entry: 

Businesses were recently moved away from individual profiles and into business pages. The business page makes it easier to connect businesses with their employees and for those employees to share business identification, membership and act on behalf of a business at ProZ.com. 

Since the launch, business pages have been showcased in the Translation Company & agency directory, added to employee profiles, and have been linked other places on the site.

How can your business increase views to its business page? 

André Lisboa is an English - Portuguese translator based in Brazil. He is a ProZ.com member, and member of the Certified PRO Network (CPN). He has been working in the translation industry for over 25 years now, and has recently published a book, How to Become a Successful International Translator. In the book, he discusses some translation basics like resources and CAT tools, and also goes into detail on marketing, building a portfolio, time and resource management, and other subjects. The English edition of the book includes an interview with Ofer Tirosh, CEO of Tomedes Translations, on the translation industry in general, and what they look for when they hire new linguists.

I interviewed André about How to Become a Successful International Translator, and his thoughts on translation and the industry:

Enrichments to how businesses are displayed at ProZ.com have been taking place over the past several months. 

The increased data has resulted in enhancements for finding businesses. More can be done now to highlight your business for end clients, potential partners, freelance translators and more. 

Where does your business rank in the translation agencies & companies directory at ProZ.com?

The answer to that question is now immediately available to all recognized employees of a business.

Founded in 1979, The National Center for Interpretation (NCI) is a research and outreach unit at the University of Arizona located in Tucson, Arizona. From its inception, the unit was charged with promoting intercultural communication and social justice for language minorities, mainly through training and testing for interpreters and translators. A corollary objective was that of advancing the professionalism of the field. Our previous director and founder, Dr. Roseann Gonzalez, provided the groundbreaking work that lead to the establishment of the process to assess and certify federal court interpreters in Spanish, Navajo, and Haitian Creole. Her work set the standard for interpreter testing for the entire profession of court interpreting, and helped to expand interpreter testing and training across many regions and professional fields in the USA. In 1983, Dr. Gonzalez founded the then 3-week Summer Court Institute for Court Interpretation. She also created the Medical Interpreter Training Institute and both institutes’ curricula continue to be valid -- and even considered a gold standard by some-- in today’s ever-changing world of interpreting.

Have you done post-editing work? Have your clients approached you about it? Have machine translation and post-editing changed the way you work, or the way you present your services to clients? There is a short survey running on the topic. If you have a few minutes, your input would be greatly appreciated:

Please share your experiences in this 18-question survey »

A new translation contest starts today, with a source text in English. Submissions will be open until February 27th.

View the source text an submit an entry here »

In the previous post, we took a look at CAT tool use among translators. Now we will delve into this subject some more, examining which tools are being used, how translators are deciding on those tools, favorites, least favorites, and recommendations.

And if you are a reader who likes charts and graphs, you're in luck. 

Every now and then, the subject of the use of Translation Memories (TMs) and Computer-aided Translation (CAT) tools comes up in the ProZ.com forums and elsewhere. Should you use a CAT tool? Why? Which one? Why (again)? Are there kinds of work where a CAT tool will not be useful?

In a previous State of the industry report for freelance translators, the word on TMs and CAT tools was to take them as "a given." A high percentage of translators use at least one CAT tool, and reports on the increased productivity and efficiency that can accompany their use are solid enough to indicate that, unless the kind of translation work you do by its very nature excludes the use of a CAT tool, you should be using one.

Hi translators and interpreters.

There have been significant changes in translation and interpreting in recent years. How are you, as a freelancer, adapting?