ProZ.com Blog

Last year, ProZ.com launched a new service called Meetups for members to engage in online networking during this new normal where networking in person became nearly impossible. 

This year,  ProZ.com teamed up with Terra Localizations to bring you a series of Meetups about game localization. Divided in six levels, the first one —open to members and non-members— took place on June 24.

Are you new to the translation industry? Would you like to work as a translator, but you are unsure about how to get started? Do you have questions about ProZ.com, the platform, the community, the tools available? Then this post is for you. Just keep the following in mind, and you'll find your way in the ProZ.com translation workplace in no time:

« ProZ.com is different than what you may be expecting »

The following questions and answers will show you why.

What do you do when you’re a rebellious tomboy growing up in a conservative country dominated by the Catholic Church, with education run mostly by nuns and priests, 25% unemployment, the shadow of the Troubles looming further to the North, and a national tradition for exporting its people?

A web widget is an independent application that can be embedded into a web-page, blog, or profile on a social media site and that will enable the display of information (your client feedback) or the call for an action ("Follow me").

Many are the reasons we change countries in the course of our lives. For the majority of us, those reasons are innocuous enough – we are drawn to different cultures, or climates, or lured by romance. And yet such life choices are sometimes far harder, as we’ll see in the case of translator and interpreter Mahdi Abdulbasit, who fled Ethiopia for Egypt in 2016.

She’s a one-woman United Nations, born of Moroccan parents in Spain, now living in the USA and married to a man of British descent, who grew up in a part of the USA dominated by Pennsylvania Dutch families, who are in fact German. Today the street where she lives in New York City’s “forgotten borough” of Staten Island has the highest Liberian population outside of Liberia, plus plenty of Mexicans, Jamaicans and myriad other nationalities. And if that weren’t enough to endorse her candidature for Secretary-General, Nawal Kramer is one of those rare people who is genuinely bicultural.

Among the business membership benefits included in the Plus and Enterprise subscriptions, there is the possibility to assign two professional memberships to any two profiles on the site. Before, business members needed to contact site staff to assign them, but now they can do it from their own business page. 

You already know what mistakes to avoid when posting a job and how to make the most of your searches with ProZ Find, as well as how to choose service providers based on their feedback and qualifications, but what if you need to ensure the confidentiality of a project?

As we’ll see throughout this series, life can take us on some strange journeys from where we started out to where we end up. In the case of Paul Urwin, who was born and grew up in the sleepy Somerset town of Street, (main claim to fame: it’s home to Clarks, the famous British footwear brand), a number of decisions and chance encounters led him to the life he now leads in Bogotá, Colombia, fluent in Spanish, a happy husband and father, and of course Head of Training at ProZ.com.

GTE Localize’s Journey

GTE Localize is a regional language vendor focusing on Southeast Asian languages. In 2017, it was founded in Hanoi, Vietnam with the sole focus on the Vietnamese language in which they have a huge competitive edge of culture understanding and reasonable high-quality resources.

As any other aspect of our lives, our jobs have been re-shaped by this “new reality”. As language professionals we are used to perform remote work, but for interpreters reality is –or was– different.

Are you a translation agency or LSP looking to expand your pool of service providers for future projects? Or a freelancer who wants to get their name out there and be contacted by potential new clients? ProZ.com applications may be what you are looking for.

Business membership allows you to streamline your recruiting processes while giving you tools to meet new clients. Now a new business membership benefit has been included to increase exposure to potential clients and service providers in ProZ.com's social media profiles.

ProZ.com Meetups are a new way for ProZ.com paying members to network, communicate, share and have fun with other language professionals in a virtual environment.

Join ProZ.com/TV for the second day of a free live event on October 1 to celebrate International Translation Day. ITD 2020 streams live through ProZ.com and its social media platforms starting at 9:55 GMT on Thursday.