Interested in meeting up with your colleagues from home? ProZ.com is excited to bring you virtual powwows, where you can hook up with your colleagues - even during this time of social distancing.
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Join ProZ.com/TV for free access to the online Freelancer Success Summit April 7-9th, organized specifically to help you through this critical period. There is no pre-registration required and is available for all site users at ProZ.com.
By now, the entire world knows that the current Covid-19 outbreak has --and will continue to have-- an enormous impact on freelance financial lives. However, language professionals who usually work on-site --interpreters, project managers, teachers-- don't necessarily have to live off savings during the current quarantine. ProZ.com has a few tricks up its sleeve to make money starting this weekend and while at home, and supplement your income during these uncertain times.
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A jobs checkbox on ProZ.com with a new COVID-19 tag now enables job posters to tag their jobs as "Covid-19" and service providers to filter Covid-19 jobs. Many job posters are already using this option to connect with some of the 1 million language professionals at ProZ.com.
Once upon a time, there were nothing but rice fields here. The city of Taoyuan (桃園, meaning “peach garden”), a post-war creation, is now a thriving urban hub, just 20 minutes by high-speed train from the Taiwanese capital Taipei. Many of its residents work there, and the station platforms every morning are full, but not only of Taiwanese. Crowds of migrant workers from Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines give the place a south-east Asian feel. It’s also here that Taiwan’s airport is situated.
More than ten years ago, ProZ.com released an online rates calculator designed to help you determine the minimum rates required to meet your objectives. Together with forum discussions, the record of average rates reported by the community, and other useful resources such as the the article "Determining your rates and fees as a translator", the rates calculator has proved to be very helpful in answering one of the questions asked more frequently by freelance language professionals: what rates should I charge for...?
Old houses and barns with red tiles set in a patchwork of green meadows and fields. Farms and ranches scattered among hills and rivers. The echoing cry of long-necked cranes, fading into crepuscular silence. Buzzards circling high overhead. Air that smells different in every season, from springtime dew to summer fertiliser, the smoky tang of fireplaces and rotten leaves in the autumn, the brittle crunch of frost and snow in the frozen winter.
You already know how to assess a new client and decide if you're comfortable starting a professional relation with them. Unfortunately, clients new and old may sometimes get behind with payments for a number of reasons. From a change of personnel in the finance department, through an inefficient new management software, all the way to cashflow issues; there are a myriad factors that may cause a client who has long been reliable and trustworthy to leave your invoice unpaid.
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On a foggy day, there’s a deep, resonant sound that rolls in from the water: the horns of freight tankers inching their way towards the commercial ports of New York Harbour, through the Narrows. We’re in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a lower-middle-class district with rich Italian and Irish roots, so you can count on getting phenomenal pizza at Campania, world-class pignoli and cannoli at Paneantico, and a perfect cocktail of whiskey and banter at Kitty Kiernans. But look carefully and you can also make out Greek, Russian and Spanish threads in the local fabric.
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ProZ.com offers a free webinar on meeting clients. The webinar is offered to help members get the most out of the tools available through the site. Attend an upcoming webinar to get the most out of ProZ.com and meet more clients.
The “Meeting clients at ProZ.com” webinar is moderated by María Florencia Vita of ProZ.com. It is part of the training available at ProZ.com.
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It’s winter in Finnsnes, Northern Norway. Some days it gets so cold, (minus 33 degrees anyone?), your glasses freeze over the moment you step outside – the clean, fresh Arctic Circle air searing into your lungs. There are fifty shades of snow: capping the distant mountains, stacking up in drifts at the side of the road, crunching as cars pass, or crisp underfoot. Kids can be seen skiing to school, women kick-sledding to work, and the odd granny has even been spotted whizzing to the doctor’s on a snow scooter.
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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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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.
