Ask your average viewer of the news what comes to mind when you say “Syria”, and you’re unlikely to hear them describe a liberal, cosmopolitan city with an elegant Corniche, a rich culinary tradition, colourful markets groaning with fresh fruit and vegetables, and a 12th-century cathedral. Not to mention the castles, towers, artefacts and ruins of a whole palimpsest of civilisations, from Phoenician to Aramaic and from Canaanite to Christian and Islamic. What’s more, a city surrounded by virginal landscapes of undulating, forested hills, dotted with ancient ruins, and watered by sparkling rivers. But then again, perhaps your average viewer of the news has never seen, or even heard of Tartus.

Andrew Morris

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. 

Mike Donlin

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.

Mike Donlin

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.

Mike Donlin

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.

Andrew Morris

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.

Andrew Morris

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. 

Andrew Morris

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. 

Andrew Morris

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.

Andrew Morris

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.

Andrea Capuselli

Among the many benefits of ProZ.com Plus membership is the chance to take part in the Translation Mastermind group on Facebook. It’s an established community of professionals who enjoy sharing ideas and tips about translation, in a completely troll-free atmosphere. It’s into its fourth year now, an independent entity, but sponsored by ProZ.com from Day 1.

Andrew Morris

It's 1999, the human population of the world surpasses six billion, the number of Internet users worldwide has just reached 150 million, and the EURO currency is adopted by an important number of European countries; SpongeBob SquarePants premieres on Nickelodeon and The Matrix, The Sixth Sense and Star Wars: Episode I are released; Barbie Doll turns forty and the world is getting ready for the year 2000 by running tests for the millennium bug; My Space is officially released while Bluetooth is announced, and Red Hot Chili Peppers and Christina Aguilera take over the radio. And while these capture the world's attention, ProZ.com makes its first appearance as a website for freelancers in April, re-vamped in August as a translation-specific web portal.

Lucía Leszinsky

On Friday, August 30th, we met at a pancake cafe & diner in San Telmo, Buenos Aires, Argentina,to celebrate ProZ.com’s 20th anniversary. It was the first ProZ.com powwow for many of us, including the newly added staff members from the Argentinian team. We ended up being forty people —taking up more tables than planned— and we had a lot of fun!

Andrea Capuselli

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.

Hayjor Roca

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.

Jared Tabor