ProZ.com regularly hosts translation contests for the entertainment of site users. As a contestant, this is an interesting opportunity to expand your experience. Source texts aim to be a bit of a challenge, perhaps even pushing you out of your comfort zone.
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Throw open the window and the air is spiced with the aroma of freshly fried Ta’amya (the Egyptian Falafel) and Ful (fava beans stewed in tomato sauce), overlaid with less attractive but equally persistent topnotes of household rubbish, in both the poorest and the richest districts of Cairo.
The streets are clogged with honking traffic, inching its way through the noisy, boisterous city. At times it feels the only way to escape and gulp in mouthfuls of fresh air is to head down to the majestic Nile.
It's against this background, in the upmarket middle-class district of Nasr City, that 29 year-old Norhan Mahmoud plies her trade as a translator and interpreter between Arabic and English.
As a freelance language professional on ProZ.com, there are many ways for you to find work. The vast majority of the workload that flows through the site comes from clients searching the Translators Directory or ProZ Find, so a good ProZ.com profile is a must to meet new clients through the site.
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Over at the Translators and Interpreters (ProZ.com) Facebook Group, there are plans for a series of weekly posts introducing you to the people behind ProZ.com. Some of them you may have come across, while others have remained in the shadows… until now! In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll get to know all of them in turn. This is our third profile.
Originally Lu Leszinsky wanted to help people through becoming a doctor and working for Doctors without Borders. But life took a different turn, via a move to live on her own, aged just 17, followed by a degree in translation in La Plata, near Buenos Aires, where ProZ.com has an office. Medicine’s loss is our gain!
ProZ.com releases new Translator Training interface at training.proz.com. ProZ.com's training mission is to provide accessible, best in class, skill-building, industry-recognized training to support language professionals in achieving their business objectives and reaching their full potential.
In conjunction with the new training interface, ProZ.com has released a new training format - Spotlight Training. Spotlight Training is designed to help linguists advance their career with focused training that includes handouts, supplemental materials, videos & webinars, cohort groups & small group coaching/Q&A sessions. Spotlight training sessions with Group Coaching sessions start March 3rd:
In conjunction with the new training interface, ProZ.com has released a new training format - Spotlight Training. Spotlight Training is designed to help linguists advance their career with focused training that includes handouts, supplemental materials, videos & webinars, cohort groups & small group coaching/Q&A sessions. Spotlight training sessions with Group Coaching sessions start March 3rd:
Getting started can be tough! Are you asking yourself - How do I find clients? How do I overcome a lack of experience? What CAT Tool should I choose? How can I maximize my exposure on online platforms and portals like ProZ.com & LinkedIn? If so, then ProZ.com Spotlight Training is perfect for you.
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As a freelancer at ProZ.com, you have the option to include rates. Some do, some do not.
In a previous Facebook group discussion, Andrew Morris suggested that he always preferred not to in the early days when seeking out new clients all the time, because some clients surprise you by offering you more than you’d have naturally stated.
That seems like a simple explanation for one side of the debate.
I’m sure there are less dramatic ways of taking a fresh look at your life than having a heart attack, (as happened to me last week), but unfortunately we aren’t always offered a choice.
It casts just about everything in a new light, but for obvious reasons, the main effect is to make you consider your lifestyle in terms of health.
Because we’re freelancers, without the safety net of most long-term employees, we’re particularly vulnerable, making it all the more important to focus – if just for a little while – on some key issues.
It’s vital to inhabit the right mindset as a freelancer, which includes both the story we tell ourselves, and the emotional state we inhabit. But none of that means we don’t have to have the core skills to do the job, day in day out, or the strategies to get the word out and begin to interact with clients.
Whether that’s in your website, your marketing, your social media pronouncements, or your attendance at trade fairs and industry conferences… the list goes on.
ProZ.com has experienced 20 years of success as the largest, most trusted online community where language professionals can freely form transparent and open working relationships. For these relationships to continue, there are important basics for freelancers to remember when being approached by an outsourcer.
An outsourcer in this case is one who obtains services from an external, rather than internal source. A freelancer may also call this outsourcer a client, or their customer. The person or business providing the work is referred here as an outsourcer.
Remembering these 6 basic ways to qualify new outsourcers will save any language professional plenty of immediate and long-term trouble.
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Editor's note: This blog post was published by ProZ.com founder Henry Dotterer over 15 years ago (December 19, 2004) as part of the ProZ.com Translation Article Knowledgebase. There are some minor edits made here based on the platform's evolution. Does it still apply today? I think so.
Fact: Clients rarely go looking for good all-around translators. They almost always search for translators whose skills match perfectly with the job they have in hand.
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ProZ.com's unique membership model means that when outsourcers and service providers connect via ProZ.com, neither side is charged any commissions or fees. Meet a client or provider, and the relationship is yours, unencumbered, forever. What does this mean?
In the second half of 2019, ProZ.com, Translators without Borders, and other organizations collaborated with Common Sense Advisory (CSA) on a survey directed at professional translators and interpreters. The information gathered in this survey, which was completed by over 7,000 professionals (most of them freelancers), was then used by CSA to build a report which covers a variety of areas, including demographics, behaviors, interaction with clients, income, technology, and trends and challenges being faced by today's freelance language professional. The ProZ.com team is happy to be able to help distribute this report to those who may be interested.
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California Assembly Bill 5 took effect on January 1, 2020 and holds that most workers are employees - not freelancers. This has started to impact the gig economy and the language industry's translators and interpreters.
The statute (AB5) was signed into law by California governor Gavin Newsom in September 2019 and took effect on January 1, 2020. While initial coverage focused on freelance drivers for ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft, its impact has been felt across many industries including language professionals.
SEO, short for search engine optimization, is a cluster of practices and techniques for increasing the quality and quantity of visits of a website or a web page by targeting search engine users. Over half of all website traffic comes from organic search —that means, traffic from search engines that you aren’t paying for. In Google alone, 63,000 searches are conducted per second.
SEO settings affect not only how you show up on ProZ.com, but how (and if) you appear on search engines.
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