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In case you had not noticed, you can now log in to your ProZ.com account using your Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn credentials.

These log in options are provided to make it easier to jump to your ProZ.com account, or to access your account in the event of a forgotten password.

If you run a website or application and would like to allow your users the option of signing in with their ProZ.com accounts, you can find out how here.

A recent survey of freelancers centered around their marketing efforts showed some interesting finds:

• 55% of freelancers spend 3 hours a week on their online marketing efforts
• 51% of respondents considered marketing too time-consuming, and 41% felt marketing was too costly
• 83% are investing financially in online marketing of some sort
• 72% say they are spending less than but up to 100 USD a month in marketing (those who spend more than that report earning more)
• The average survey respondent had reached their income goal within two years of starting out

The survey sample were some 2,000 US freelancers of all types, so it is reasonable to expect those numbers to be somewhat different if we narrow it down to translators and interpreters, expand the sample to other countries, or both.

One number in particular that caught my eye was the monthly investment in marketing. 100 USD a month sounded pretty steep to me, but maybe I’m wrong. 1,200 USD in freelancer marketing a year. Do you spend that much on your marketing? If so, drop me a line, I’d be very interested in hearing about it and if you find it to be a good investment.

If you are already a paying ProZ.com member, you are spending between 12 and 18 dollars a month on marketing through your membership, though you get all the rest of the tools and opportunities available along with it. It’s a kind of marketing that is easy to do, what we’d call passive marketing.

Be an ant, not a grasshopper

For some kinds of work, sending CVs, applications, emails, calling or meeting potential clients, printing business cards or flyers, posting ads, and all of that active marketing, can be effective. Many freelance translators and interpreters find that kind of marketing tiring, frustrating, and also expensive, both in terms of money and time. You’d rather be translating or interpreting, right?

You may have to rush to do active marketing if you suddenly find yourself short on clients or workload. This tends to happen when a freelancer has no kind of marketing in place while they are fully-booked, a bit like the grasshopper who watched the ant stock up for winter, unworried during the summer because food was plentiful, and then sorely unprepared for the winter.

Passive marketing is your ant stocking up for winter. It can help save you from the unexpected, even though work might be plentiful now. And sometimes it’s a gateway to new opportunities that can pop up and replace what you’ve got going on with something even better.

Where is your shop window?

As I said, passive marketing is easier to do, if you do it right, and the time/monetary investment is quite different too. It basically consists of opening up a brightly-lit shop window (your online presence) on a bustling street. Many people walk by, window shopping, but if your shop has the right goods (your services, expertise, samples, things that make you stand out), shoppers will pop in to look and talk to you. Some will be interested in buying now, some will simply make a note of your shop for when they do need what you have to offer.

Where is that bustling street, though? Well, ProZ.com is one of them. You should have a professional online presence in any serious work-related venue for language professionals (a profile on LinkedIn, for example). But since ProZ.com is the busiest street when it comes to searching for and finding language professionals, if you are not figuring there as prominently as possible, you are definitely missing out on client contact. So that ProZ.com membership, roughly the cost of a new pair of shoes per year, is all you need to keep your shop window on the busiest street in the industry.

Check your directory ranking in your top language pair and area of expertise. What page of the results are you on? How many pages of results will your ideal client browse through to get to you? They say, “The best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of Google search results.” Directory results work in a similar way. Chances are, by the time a client has gone a few pages in, they’ve already found the people they are looking for.

Don’t waste my time

Now, when I say “online presence” I don’t mean having a profile registered on a place and having the bare minimum of information filled out there. Nowadays, if I’m looking for a service/service provider online, I don’t even look twice at people who have not put some time investment into presenting their services. No picture? No thanks. No real name? See ya. No details about the services you offer or why I should choose you? Don’t waste my time! This is where the time investment comes in. It’s mostly an up-front investment. Put in the time to craft that presentation, then go do whatever else you want, and let it go to work for you in the background.

Now think about your two biggest clients…

I’ve got all the clients I can handle right now, no need, you might say. OK! But how many times would you try to go back to a shop that was closed every time you went there?

Now, think about your two biggest clients. Would you be in trouble if tomorrow, through no fault of your own, you lost those two clients? If so, why not put your shop window out there, and occasionally field an inquiry from an interested potential client? The worst that can happen is that you’ll make some new contacts while you’re working, and heaven forbid your fully-booked status should change, you’ll have some good leads to work with.

What’s in your shop window?

Now go over to your ProZ.com profile. At the top of your profile you will see a link to “Force visitor view”. Click on that. What you see is what any visitor to your profile will see when they are evaluating working with you. Put yourself in the shoes, or eyes, of your ideal client. Does what you see there look professional, attractive, keep your interest, “sell” you on the idea of contacting this person with a work offer? Does it speak to that person’s strengths, what makes them different from the competition?

By the way, if you are looking for ways to build, update, or fine tune your online presentation, many of the same principles of decorating a real shop window apply! Thinking about it this way may also help get your creative juices going. If you need some inspiration, you can find some pointers here:
https://www.appearhere.co.uk/inspire/blog/how-to-dress-your-shop-window

A survey of freelancers and the results were recently published by Wise Brand. The company focuses on providing marketing services, so the survey is mostly centered on marketing efforts and results. Some of the numbers:

• 55% of freelancers spend 3 hours a week on their online marketing efforts
• 51% of respondents considered marketing too time-consuming, and 41% felt marketing was too costly
• 83% are investing financially in online marketing of some sort
• 72% say they are spending less than 100 USD a month in marketing
• The average survey respondent had reached their income goal within two years of starting out

You can read more in this article on Entrepreneur: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/308524

Or see the report by Wise Brand: http://wisebrand.co/state-of-the-freelance-nation-survey/press-release/

How do these results compare with your own experience? Are numbers like these likely to be very different among freelance language professionals specifically?

A new and critical report from the Danish national auditor Rigsrevisionen has drawn attention to serious deficiencies among interpreters employed by a number of government bodies, including the police and the health sector.

Danish police forces are obliged to use interpreters chosen from an approved list, but the report shows the majority of them don’t satisfy the criteria laid down by the Justice Ministry.

Among other things, the ministry stipulates that interpreters ought to have a long academic education in linguistics or speak the language as their mother tongue – as well as being able to speak and write Danish fluently.

In practice, the burden of evaluating an interpreter’s capabilities falls on the ordinary police officer who is unable to speak the language in question.

Data in the report shows that in the health sector, almost every fourth employee has experienced a situation in which a course of treatment or examination has been postponed or delayed because of either a lack of or inadequate interpreters.

Read more >>

Croissant is an app that allows its members to try out nearby coworking spaces at a reduced cost. In exchange for a monthly subscription, users can book participating coworking spaces depending on the number of hours they plan to use, with the option to rollover unused hours.

If you are into coworking or have been thinking of trying it out and you live in or near one of the 40 cities that are currently covered, this might be worth checking out. They offer a free seven-day trial to test drive the service.

Read more on Business Insider at http://www.businessinsider.com/croissant-coworking-space-app-review-2018-3

Or on the Croissant website at https://www.getcroissant.com/

Dealing with the translation of PDF files could turn into a nightmare during some translation projects. Getting them without their source files often causes trouble that would probably have not arisen if clients had sent the text in its original format. So why do some customers send PDF files for translation? There’s certainly not just one answer to this question. What can we do when there is no chance of receiving the source files? Should we charge more when working on PDF files? This article explores some aspects of handling PDFs during a translation project.

http://blog.peempip.gr/dealing-with-pdf-files/

At the recent GALA conference, the creation of a non-profit initiative focused on the interpreting industry was announced: The Interpretation Technologies Alliance.

From their press release:

Globalization requires multilingual communication. Multinationals and cross-border investors are turning to a new generation of on-demand simultaneous interpreting solutions to connect with foreign partners, experts, employees, and customers. This trend, combined with the rise of cloud-based unified communications services and increased interest in AI-powered translation, inspired the alliance’s founding members to take action.

“As more of the world’s meetings take place in the cloud, it is important to make them effortlessly multilingual,” said Barry Slaughter Olsen, a professor of interpretation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS) and co-founder of industry trade group InterpretAmerica. “The ITA brings together passionate entrepreneurs and technologists to solve this problem and accelerate market adoption,” he continued.

The founding members are Boostlingo, Cadence Translate, Headvox, KUDO, Voiceboxer, and ZipDX. In the coming weeks and months, the alliance will work to highlight use cases of interpreting technology through private sector trade shows and industry media, with a focus on fast-growth and non-traditional sources of demand, including the financial services, high-tech and transportation industries.

“There is a wealth of knowledge and insight lying just across the language barrier,” says Jonathan Rechtman, co-founder of Cadence Translate and interim director and secretary of the alliance. “ITA showcases the technology and talent that can deliver tremendous value to international investors and managers.”

“ITA is dedicated to expand the size of multilingual meetings,” adds Fardad Zabetian, CEO and founder of KUDO, “the number of decentralized meetings has been growing and we are passionate to add language capabilities to those meetings.”

The alliance is recruiting an executive director, and interested parties can learn more at the alliance’s website, which launches today at www.itaglobal.org.

Applications for new members will open later this year. A waitlist can be joined by emailing [email protected]. Clients interested in using cloud-based interpretation solutions are encouraged to contact Jonathan Rechtman at [email protected].

See full press release >>

In this episode we talk about a new tool for freelance translators. I am all for efficiency and organization, but I am also quite lazy, and have struggled keeping track of my projects, number of words and how valuable different projects have been for me, how long they took etc. But now there is a tool that is super easy to use, that does all this for me, and much more. I interview the co-founder and co-creator of the tool Caroline Bries.

Important things mentioned in this episode:

• LSP.expert as a project management tool for freelance translators
• All the functions in LSP.expert – quoting, job tracking, expenses, income, reports, invoicing, outsourcing, timer and much more
• Security and support for LSP.expert

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

• LSP.expert
• Review of LSP.Expert by Silver Tongue Translations
• LSP.Experts Facebook page
• How LSP.Expert revolutionized my business – Review on The Open Mic

Listen to the interview >>

The Hermes platform to screen potential subtitlers for Netflix, released last year, has already closed– at least temporarily– as it has apparently reached its maximum capacity of applicants:

The Access to Knowledge Awards are presented annually to top contributors supporting the Translators without Borders mission. These award winners are leading the effort to ensure vulnerable people have access to vital knowledge in local languages. These awards are the preeminent honor given by Translators without Borders to those from the humanitarian, development and language sectors working in the field of communications in the right language.

The awards, which honor volunteers, donors, and non-profit partners, are given within six categories: Right to Knowledge Award for a translator or translation company who has translated humanitarian content with Translators without Borders; Excellence Award for an individual who has volunteered ‘above and beyond’ in supporting Translators without Borders; Empowerment Award for an individual or organization who has helped train or mentor new translators; Communicator of the Year for an individual who builds awareness of the need to increase access to knowledge; Humanitarian Communicator for a non-profit that exemplifies increased access to information in the right language; and Donor Award for an individual or organization that has significantly contributed to the financial health of Translators without Borders.

Congratulations to ProZ.com member Gladis Audi, on the French Translation Team receiving the Empowerment Award, and to Ashutosh Mitra, Monika Saraf and Bhashna Gupta, receiving honorable mention as part of the eCancer Hindi team.

See the full awards announcement >>

Hello everybody,

I just got notified, that PayPal is changing its Tems & Conditions on May 25th 2018.

You should give it 5 minutes and check the conditions concerning your country of residence and also which countries are the ones, you get the most transactions from. Mind, that there’s a huge difference if payments are based on bank accounts or credit cards.

I e.g. just realized, that it makes a big financially difference, that my account is registered in Germany, not Austria, and have to make the necessary changes soon.

How do you handle your PayPal fees anyway? Are you simply accepting that loss of money or do you add the costs in your invoices, so the client has to pay them?

Have a great and productive week,

Frederik

Wordfast has released version 5.4 of its platform independent desktop tool, Wordfast Pro. Notable features and improvements include Adaptive Transcheck, a new segment changes report format, a new feedback proxy tool, and the ability to connect to Wordfast Anywhere TMs and glossaries. This latest feature puts the power of server-based TMs and glossaries into the hands of desktop users for free. Please see the release notes page for more details.

Wordfast also recently released Wordfast Anywhere 5.0 which includes a localized user interface in French and Spanish. The UI is ready to be translated to other languages with a collaborative translation page accessible through a user’s profile.

Wordfast will be showcasing the interconnectivity of Wordfast Pro and Wordfast Anywhere during its 4th annual user conference – Wordfast Forward – to take place on June 1-2, 2018 in Cascais, Portugal.

“A team of Microsoft researchers announced on Wednesday they’ve created the first machine translation system that’s capable of translating news articles from Chinese to English with the same accuracy as a person. The company says it’s tested the system repeatedly on a sample of around 2,000 sentences from various online newspapers, comparing the result to a person’s translation in the process – and even hiring outside bilingual language consultants to further verify the machine’s accuracy.”

Source: Techcrunch