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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 fourth profile.
It all begins with a classic story, back in 1996: guy meets girl (she’s a foreign exchange student in high school), takes a gap year, travels from his native Utah to be with her in Argentina, breaks up with her. But along the way he gets to know the language and the culture, and ends up staying. Every year, he tells himself “Next year I’ll go back”, but next year never comes, and it’s now been well over 20 years. Jared Tabor’s Spanish is of course now fluent, with more than a hint of Argentinian accent.
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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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.
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?
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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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Serving the world's largest community of translators, ProZ.com delivers a comprehensive network of essential services, resources and experiences that enhance the lives of its members. What are some of the site's most popular features?
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