ProZ.com Translation Forums

Poll: Have you ever participated in a ProZ Translation Contest? | I did

Daryo — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 11:54:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Have you ever participated in a ProZ Translation Contest?
Poster: Daryo
Post title: I did

I did participate in few.

The one with Yogi Berra quotes was great fun.

But the last one I took a close look at put me off for good.

It's all here:

[quote]Daryo wrote:

[quote]Lingua 5B wrote:

I assume it’ll turn into a post-editing or GPT clean-up contest. [/quote]

Nothing new there ... already happened, years ago.

see

I lost all interest in translation contests few years ago, when I spotted an entry - a "translation into Serbian" - that was blatantly done by someone who doesn't know the first thing about the Serbian language but used some MT instead, and nothing was done to remove it.

[url removed] #:~:text=Could%20do%20all,to%20remove%20it.

and

If it was in the Proz contest, there is actually one fictional profile (GoTrans) that Proz uses to make MT entries (this was explained during the last Translation Day event).
It's a sort of gimmick which is there since quite some time to track I suppose the progress of machine translation.
[url removed] #:~:text=Could%20do%20all,to%20remove%20it.

and

creating fictional profiles that other contest participants have no ways of knowing are fictional ought to be against some rule - especially given that it was NEVER announced in any translation contest rule that MT posing as a fictional profile will be a participant. It didn't "let me down", I simply decided I have better use of my time than to be a free tester for MT:.
[url removed] #:~:text=creating%20fictional%20profiles,tester%20for%20MT.

[/quote]

I STILL can't see anything in the rules that would prohibit a bot from 'contributing' with some raw AI output, nor humans from submitting barely corrected or raw AI output as 'their work' (even from or into languages they know nothing about!)

I guess it all depends on how you define 'original work' ...

1. Entries must be original works. Reuse or referencing of existing (ex. published) translations, in whole or in part, is prohibited and leads to disqualification. It is possible to work with one other person, but that person must be included as a partner when the entry is submitted.

[url removed] #:~:text=1.,entry%20is%20submitted.

Poll: Have you ever participated in a ProZ Translation Contest? | A few times

Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 10:22:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Have you ever participated in a ProZ Translation Contest?
Poster: Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
Post title: A few times

I was rather keen on them and took part in several between 2008 and 2014 (won some). By then, I considered these contests both entertaining and challenging but, after a while, I felt that they were very poorly designed. One of the flaws is that each competitor is allowed to judge the other competitors. Are we really so impartial to be fair to other people’s entries? Then, to top it up, there was an infamous one ( [url removed] ) where it took several years to announce the winners. So, I stopped participating...

Poll: Have you ever participated in a ProZ Translation Contest?

ProZ.com Staff — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 08:10:05 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: Have you ever participated in a ProZ Translation Contest?
Poster: ProZ.com Staff

This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Have you ever participated in a ProZ Translation Contest?".

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