ProZ.com report to members, 2018

Dear members,

Next year marks 20 years of ProZ.com helping language professionals to expand their businesses and improve their work, while networking and also having fun. Here's a glimpse/reminder of what ProZ.com looked like back in the beginning.

Since then, ProZ.com paying members have been using an ever-growing suite of services and benefits the site provides to take their careers to the next level. They are also the reason the site has been able to offer those tools and opportunities, and the reason the site is available to everyone. So if you are a paying member of ProZ.com and are reading this, thank you! The ProZ.com site team is here to serve you.

Here is what has been going on at ProZ.com since the last report to members.

New services and benefits

ProZ Pay™ is a service designed to facilitate quick and easy payments from clients to their freelance service providers. With ProZ Pay™, a client can set up payment to many service providers at once, without the need to spend time making various different individual payments via different platforms. For freelancers, ProZ Pay™ offers a way to request payments via custom link, optional integration with ProZ.com invoicing, and the potential to get paid sooner, using the payment method you prefer. There is also an additional benefit in being able to show prospective clients online that you are a real person who has been paid by previous clients. Find out more »

The new native language verification program allows ProZ.com members who are Plus subscribers, or who have helped to verify the native languages of three or more peers, to have their native language(s) verified. To date, 1,436 people have applied for native language verification. Find out more »

More and better potential connections between clients and service providers

Significant effort is being made to improve the experience and results for those who use ProZ.com to seek the services of freelance language professionals (thereby improving results for freelancers as well). This includes, but is not limited to, improvements to matching clients and service providers, and improving the marketing tools and benefits available to members.

Business membership (formerly Corporate) has been updated as part of a restructuring that started last year, and consists of three benefit tiers: Standard, Plus, and a new tier, Enterprise.

World map of Business member translation companies: You can peruse 500+ translation companies and agencies who are Business members at ProZ.com on the new Business member map. The maps shows information about each company, including location, contact info, and average LWA rating.

Business pages are being released. Business pages are separate from profiles and Blue Board records, and are designed to provide a centralized record of factual, up to date information regarding a given company, including the individual profiles on ProZ.com operating on behalf of that company.

ProZ.com Pools™, introduced last year, have continued to grow, and access to these groups of pre-screened experts are one of the benefits of Business membership. As of today, there are pools for the following areas:

• Game localizers
• Pharmaceutical translators
• Literary translators
• Interpreters (map available)
• Project managers
• Subtitlers
• Copywriters
• Students/interns (map available)

A new directory, ProZ Find™, was released, with improved search features and additional enhancements for Business members.

ProZ.com APIs were improved and expanded. APIs (application programming interface) make it easier for applications and platforms to connect with ProZ.com services; for example, you can log in to TM-Town with your ProZ.com account thanks to the API. For two more examples of the API at work, keep reading:

If you are a BaccS user, you can now post a job to ProZ.com, view and make Blue Board entries, or share "What I am working on" posts from within BaccS, without the need to even visit ProZ.com. By the way, if you are a ProZ.com Plus subscriber, BaccS is one of the software solutions which is free with your subscription. Find out more »

If you are an XTRF user, you can now post jobs to ProZ.com from within XTRF. Find out more »

New partnerships

Strategic partnerships that can provide potential benefits to ProZ.com members continued to be explored this year. Among those:

• Protemos. A translation project management system, Protemos is free to use for freelancers. ProZ.com Business Plus members receive a free license for business use as part of their ProZ.com subscription. Find out more »
• ProZ.com members can now save 20% on books purchased at Routledge. Find out more »
• ProZ.com Plus subscribers can now receive 10 free credits a month for use with TransPDF as part of their subscription. ProZ.com users who are not Plus subscribers, or Plus subscribers who have used their monthly allotment of credits may purchase credits at a discounted rate (up to 25% off). Find out more »
• ProZ.com partnered with the European language industry association (Elia) to broadcast Elia Together 2018 in February. The online broadcast was made available free to ProZ.com Plus subscribers. ProZ.com will once again broadcast the event in 2019 (February 21 and 22, mark your calendars). Find out more »

More improvements

• The ProZ.com posted jobs list and search was updated: https://www.proz.com/language-jobs
• Improvements were made to the ProZ.com invoicing tool, based on requests from members:
• The invoicing tool is now easier to use on mobile devices, with a modernized look and feel.
• All world currencies are now supported, and exchange rates are updated automatically.
• Clients can now pay invoices online using ProZ Pay™ or PayPal.
• Financial reports contain more information, and key reports can be exported to spreadsheets for offline use.
• Many reported bugs were fixed.
• Many other small features requested over the years were also implemented. To date, more than 12,000 language professionals have used the ProZ.com invoicing tool. If you have not given it a test drive yet, check it out and see if it meets your invoicing needs »
• New WWA feedback cards were released, to allow you to better gather and display feedback from clients and colleagues. Features include:

• View private comments from clients
• Pin your favorite feedback entry to the top of your card (Member-only feature)
• View a feedback provider's average rating given (Member-only feature)
• View additional project details related to a feedback entry (ProZ.com Business member feature)
• Respond to feedback comments
• Manage your feedback card display settings 

• A new "About me" editor and localization options for your profile were added: https://www.proz.com/topic/321742
• Updates were made to the way languages can be entered in profiles. You can now list all languages you know, and set language variants and proficiency levels for each. If you haven't already done so, be sure to review and update your languages if necessary: https://www.proz.com/settings/languages
• Video greetings were added for profiles. You can use this video to speak to and show potential clients more about your services.
  If you are part of one of the Pools of specialists, you can add an introductory video there too, specific to your pool profile. Add a video greeting to your ProZ.com profile here »
• Like/Agree tools for forums and the "What I am working on" were added to better facilitate networking.
• You can now log in to ProZ.com using your LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google account.
• A new activity feed has been made available, to help you stay up to date on the areas, happenings and people that interest you on the site. You can personalize your feed, follow colleagues, etc. Look for My real-time activity feed in the menu that appears when you mouse over your name on the site, or go to https://www.proz.com/feed

Training and software

Translator group buying (TGB) continues to serve those on the market for software at a discount. Just over a thousand people have purchased using TGB so far in 2018, saving over 100,000 USD collectively. Find out more »

In the past year, ProZ.com training has served 4,800 people with training courses, webinars and training videos. In the Plus subscriber video library alone, over 2,000 hours of videos have been viewed. Find out more »

Mobile

ProZ.com Mobile continued to add features to make it easier to use ProZ.com on the go:

• Powwows and real-time chat were added.
• There is a new, customizable home screen with live activity feed.
• You can now be immediately notified via ProZ.com Mobile of new jobs and job quote reactions, new KudoZ questions and answers, forum contributions, "What I am working on" posts and comments, and more.
• There is a new notification center containing a history of your notifications, with the option of prioritizing the notifications you care about the most.
• It is now possible to call members of ProZ.com Pools™ via phone and Skype-- includes phone interpreting service by members of the interpreters pool.
• You can now update your basic profile information from within the app.
• New service integration: contests (more on contests below).

Translation contests and community news

• ProZ.com/TV provided a week of free webinars in February, and the tenth annual International Translation Day online events, which continued the tradition of reaching more translation and interpreting professionals than any other event. Did you miss one or both? Get caught up:
• Free webinars: https://www.proz.com/tv/FreeWebinars
• International Translation Day 2018 (ITD2018): https://www.proz.com/tv/ITD2018

• The ProZ.com site team are constantly in touch with members online, but sometimes they get to meet up in real life too. Staff attended BP18 and GALA 2018 this year.
• Speaking of getting together in person, this was a good year for powwows, and a special year for one group of people. Ninety-eight powwows have been proposed in 22 countries since the last report. And in Cardiff, UK, a group of translators got together to celebrate 10 years of powwows in Cardiff. Read and see more about it here: https://go.proz.com/blog/ten-years-of-translators-and-interpreters-coming-together-in-cardiff

• The sixth annual ProZ.com community choice awards (CCAs) were held. Thanks to everyone who nominated and voted for their favorites, and congratulations to the winners! Watch for spotlights and interviews with the winners in the coming months to learn more about them and what makes them outstanding. See this year's winners »
• The ProZ.com moderator class of 2018-2019 (the tenth class since the new moderator program started) began activity. Moderators perform a key role in welcoming and guiding new participants at ProZ.com, and in helping to maintain a productive work atmosphere on the site: http://www.proz.com/moderators
  
  

In May, the first translation contest for ProZ.com Mobile users was held. This was followed by two on-site contests, The Sounds of Silence and La sociedad transparente. The most recent contest, Dust Bowl, was multi-platform, and had three stages: on-site (ProZ.com), on ProZ.com Mobile, and finally on Facebook, via the ProZ.com Facebook page. A big thank you goes out to everyone who participated in contests this year, with submissions, ratings, votes, and discussion! Find out more »

Security and behind the scenes

The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in May, and in May ProZ.com became GDPR-compliant. Find out more »

Behind the scenes, many smaller changes have been made to further improve site security, including a formalized bug bounty disclosure program.

Improvements to both hardware and software were made throughout the year, to continue to ensure quick, uninterrupted delivery of the site to its members.

Appreciation

 Originally published at https://www.proz.com/topic/330935