ProZ.com Blog

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.

Last night, the film Parasite became the first non-English language movie to win Best Picture at the Oscars. It won 4 awards in total. The wins resulted in plenty of screen time in front of a worldwide audience for interpreter Sharon Choi. But does she have a profile at ProZ.com?

Carlos Rocha de la Rosa is an expert Spanish interpreter/translator who resides in the Dominican Republic. He has been a top performing interpreter for on-demand interpreting assignments via ProZ.com's partnership with Boostlingo. As part of the interpreter network, he receives payments from the ProZ*Pay platform.

He took a few minutes to answer some questions, and show us the ultimate remote interpreter home office.

Looking for a translator within a platform with over a million users can be difficult, and standing out from the crowd can be seen as an impossible task. However, there are a few things you can do to increase your possibilities to meet new clients within ProZ.com that do not take too much time or effort.

We all define success in different ways. Do you consider yourself successful? Are you proud or happy about where you are right now in your career? Of professional objectives you have reached? Would you be willing to share with others how you got there? 

A new site area, "Freelancer success stories", is now available under the "Member activities" menu.

Are you wondering whether a career in translating or interpreting may be for you? Here are some questions asked by those aspiring to be freelance translators or interpreters:

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.

Hi translators and interpreters.

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

Blogs started to appear in this format at the start of 2018. The content at ProZ.com has been used to discuss language industry trends, inform of site enhancements, and sometimes just to share a laugh. 

Of the 98 posts shared in 2018 from 12 different authors, here are the 10 that were most read.

The results are in. Thank you to everyone who nominated candidates, and all who voted in this year’s Community choice awards. Here are the winners in the interpreting-related categories:

A new map on the interpreter and student pool shows locations of those that have been screened for the pool. 
ProZ.com interpreters map

Thanks to everyone who made nominations for this, the sixth annual ProZ.com community choice awards. Voting is now open, so be sure to check out the nominees and cast your votes for your favorites in the categories for translation and interpreting at https://www.proz.com/community-choice-awards

Every year since 2013, the ProZ.com community choice awards are held to place a spotlight on language professionals who are active, influential or otherwise outstanding in various media, in both translation and interpreting. Nominees and winners are determined entirely by the ProZ.com community.

To assure individual health information is properly protected in the United States, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted in 1996. The federal law set standards for the electronic exchange, privacy and security of health information. How does this law impact on-demand video and phone interpreters?

Since its release in 2016, ProZ.com mobile for Android and iOS has already been installed and tried by more than 20,000 translators, interpreters, clients and others in the language industry --22,792 to be precise!