Transcripts
1. 1 Intro: Hi there, or you're a freelance translator, Are you interested in becoming one? Will then chances are you've either heard of prose.com or you will very soon. Some people pronounce it pro z.com, but I usually hear probes.com in short, prose.com is the best website out there for finding freelance translation jobs that can be a very frustrating website and it's also often quite complicated to navigate. And I have a lot of issues with the way it was designed and stuff like that, but it's still the best tool out there. There are other tools that can work quite well, but by enlarge Prozac comments, the best one. And that's why I figured it was worth creating a short-course for this website and to be able to navigate it correctly. I'm Robert apart. I'm a freelance translator, turned to translation agency owner. I've been a long-time user pros.com, and I've used it both as a translator and as someone hiring translators, but I'm not affiliated with it in any way. I just use it a lot. I created this class in order to teach you the best way to sign up and make use of prose.com. I see too many freelance translator squander their opportunities and basically leave money on the table because they're not using probes.com correctly. So I basically created this course to rectify that this class is for any freelance translator out there or anyone interested in freelance translation who wants to make full use of prose.com. And after this class, you'll be much more depth at navigating pros.com, which is the best tool out there for getting jobs as a freelance translator. This class also involves a class project. Now this class project will involve ideas for your user message is what it's called. And as I mentioned the course, this is one of the most important parts of your profile. And so for the class project, I'll ask you to share what your most impressive traits are and how you're going to fit it in the small amount of space available. It'll all make sense when you see that part of the course. So without further ado, let's get into the course.
2. 2 First Steps: So first of all, when you go to prose.com, this is what you see if you're a translator looking for translation jobs or work, then you go here, you click on create free account. Here you can decide if you want to click at the beginning, I would recommend not clicking on TM town. You can look into that later. Also all of these I recommend unclicking them and then you click on Create My Account. And this is what you get. You get a special onetime offer for a $110 a year and it's normally 120. If you're going to pay for anything, if you're going to pay for any service. And becoming a freelance translator, then prose.com is what you want to be paying for. So I recommended this point, just saying yes, I want in because it makes your life a lot easier. But for the sake of example, I'll click on no, thanks just to show you what a free account looks like. And then later on I'll show you how to pay for the account. Now, there's a lot of information yet you should fill out here all this requires stuff. The important thing at the beginning I think, is the language pairs. So that's what I'm going to fill out now. Let's put a tie-in to English. These are the services you perform and so click on translation. That's the important one that you can click on some other ones. Pair. I'm going to add a couple just because it gives me more chance of finding very jobs at the beginning. Anyway, you'll see what I mean in a second because I want to be able to show you some examples. English variant that's put us at time-invariance. This, keep that as it is. So now I have two language pairs. I have a native language, and then obviously at some point I need to fill out all this other information. But for now this is enough to look for jobs.
3. 3 Looking for jobs: Now to look for jobs, you click on jobs and directories here. And you see job posting system, browse job postings. Click on that. And the reason I filled out the languages is because the default here is to have my languages pop up. Now I can search in all languages or just a selection of my languages by here, the default is to have it in all my language combinations. So right away I see Italian to English, et cetera. Obviously each one of these rows is a different job being offered. Now when you see this, it means that only members can apply. So if I click on this, I can see what the job is, but I cannot submit a quote. So I need to either wait, some of them are for members until a certain time, which means members can, can apply first. So that's why it's better to be a member. Obviously, there are certain jobs, this one that's a bit of a different color means it's expired, so see job is closed so I can't apply for it anymore. And that's what very often happens. It'll expire before it becomes available to non-members. But let's click on this one. Here we see technical manual traders six k because it is available and you don't need to be a member. So I can submit a quote just quickly while we're here, I'll show you what happens when you click on submit a quote. You see the job description and obviously you should read through it and make sure it's something that's interesting for you.
4. 4 The Blue Board: Down here by the way, you see who posted the job and you also see blue border record. Now this is interesting. I'll open a new tab because we want to come back to this because you can see they're rating on the blue board. The blue board is where other people rate them because i'm I'm not a paid member. I cannot see who gave a rating and what comments they gave, but I can't see that they gave five, 55, 55. This person got a lot of fives. And so that's a huge vote of confidence. It means, is it serious providers, a serious person, and I can count on doing real business with this person.
5. 5 Submitting a Quote: So if I decide to work with this person, I click on Submit quote. Let's say Italian to English. Let's say that amount. I can say the total or per character per hour. Usually it's per word. Here, the currency and here you can fill out this other information including title. So the interesting thing here under message is that you can fill out a message. I'll just paste something that I've used in the past. And then you can decide if you want to save it as a template. You can give it a name here I wrote general English to Italian as you saw there. Save as template. So here in the future, when you apply to future jobs, your templates will pop up. You can have general English too tiny. You can have business translations, legal translations, et cetera, and you have access to them right away, so you don't need to write them out each time that you have a new job, so it makes it comfortable. And here is the catch for having a free account is that you need to pay $1 for every job you applied to. Now, once again, I'm going to open this in a new tab because actually I think you can only add $20 at a time. So deposit the funds in your wallet or you can apply for membership. I'll show you that later. Mountains say you wanted to pause it, the funds in your wallet. There, here we go. It's $20 at a time, and which allows you to apply for 20 jobs. Now obviously $20 is less than a 110. So if you feel tentative, you don't want to spend the full amount, you can always apply for jobs this way. However, I recommend paying the full amount upfront because in my experience, you get that full amount back and then some because when you're applying for these jobs, you're competing against many other people applying for these same types of jobs. This job came up recently, so it's only six quotes, but this one has 97 quotes. All of these are contact directly, these are past deadline. This only has four, which actually seems somewhat odd. And it might be because the rating isn't too high for this person. This one has a teen though 32, and contact directly, et cetera, et cetera.
6. 6 Getting paid membership: Now if you do want to get a paid membership, you click on your profile here, actually just hover above it. You don't have to click on it. And you see I have a free account now, but I can click on Upgrade account, put pros.com or not. It has a whole lot of information. You can just click on Buy now goes straight to what they have available and it's 120 or 180. Skip that for now. For now, just do 120 after a while. You can see if it's worth it to get to 180 or if they've changed it again and there's some other options. But for now just a 120 is what you can do. And in my experience actually you can still get the discount to make it 110 C. It's still minus $10, so it's 110. But again, 121, 10, the difference isn't that much. And I do think it is worth it because you're you're able to apply for as many jobs as you want and you don't have to worry about paying for each job or whether it's for members only or not. At the beginning, especially you're going to have to apply for quite a few jobs before they start noticing you. At this point, you just fill out the information. And so that's how you sign up for pros and how you either stay as a free member or you pay for membership.
7. 7 Make Jobs Come to You: So here I wanted to briefly talk about how to make sure jobs are coming to you rather than you having to go and apply for jobs actively, that you can get job notifications. So hopefully you're doing this already, but if you haven't if you aren't yet, sorry, I just wanted to walk you through real quickly. So just wanted to show you that that is possible and how to do it. And in fact, I had to go through this again myself. And I clicked and, and, and try to figure out how to do this because I hear you click on our settings because I, because I forgot as well. So actually here let me start over just so u goes to for pros.com, you go to pearls.com, the main website, and you click on your profile here. I think there are other ways to go at it. Oh, in fact, profile Mail settings, but here let's just click on Profile. This probably easier. Then click on Settings. Nevermind, let's go back to what I know. Profile Mail settings right away. Hover above this, go to profound Mail settings. Click on job notifications. Not a notification. Preferences have been moved. Good. Thank you. Please see them jobs dashboard, at least they have a link to it. This is what I'm looking for. Okay. So as you can see, I'm just going to leave that up there just because at least for me I get confused with both these websites, but kinda gives you an idea. But as I said a bit, as I said, hover over here and click on Profile male, and then you'll see the option. And then for the here and the job Mail settings, you can say preference concerning climb, but okay, here, this doesn't matter that much. Classic Java notification preferences. I would click these on. Our wouldn't restricted to any country. Pair specific. Do you want no notifications or immediate alerts? I have immediate alert. I've always had it this way. Translation jobs, potential jobs. I don't have any interpreting jobs because that's not what I do. And then fields, I just put all fields. And just so I have an idea of everything coming in. And what do we have notifications? And this is another language combination. And then connect Java notification preferences. Anyway, these Matter bit less, but this is where you do it. They can just click on Save Settings and then it's done. What this will do. It means that you get an email in your inbox every time there's a new job. And and so anytime they posted new job, like any one of these, then you can then you'll receive it right away, your e-mail so you don't have to remember to come here and check and check every day or every couple hours or whatever it is because it'll arrive right away in your email.
8. 8 Completing Your Profile: Okay, So as I mentioned before, you don't have to fill out your entire profile if you want to apply for jobs. However, it does help to fill out your entire profile for when people actually look at your profile and decide to work with you as opposed to someone else. It also, once again, as I mentioned before, helps to pay for your account and you pay yearly and that way you don't have to worry about having to pay for each job you applied to and you'll end up just applying to more jobs. And like I mentioned before, I just recommend it. So now I wanted to go through how to fill out the rest of your profile and make sure it's filled out correctly and filled out well. So first of all, what you do is you go to prose.com slash settings and you will get this view where you can view your profile and update it. And now here it gives you a username. This username is required, but you don't need to worry about it too much. As you can see, my username is a copy here. But here if we switch to this view, this is what people see when they come to my profile, you don't see a car he'd written anywhere here. The only time you see it written as my blue board affiliation, which is the reason why I have it by the way, which is when I I post jobs that others can do. Now, assuming you're not in this position, at least not right now. You really don't need to worry about it too much. And so just put whatever username you want. The important thing here is your identity. I recommend using your real name just in terms of transparency, it sounds better and it sounds more honest. And generally clients respond well to that. They can fill out the rest of the information here. My recommendation for account type is to put freelance translator because that's what you are. Obviously, if you feel like you're something else, he can fill out something else. And here, if you're a pro, if you're a paying member, it'll show up that you are pros.com member. Then you click, save and update profile and onto the next step.
9. 9 Profile Section: Contact: So for the next step, you click on Contact, which is right here on the side menu right below the probes.com account main part. And for your contact information, I recommend filling out as much as possible here. And this is just because the more information you have filled out, the better it looks. Quite frankly, it seems more transparent. It seems that it's more easy to reach you in case there are issues or problems and this generally just makes the the prospective client feel safer. So fill out whatever you feel comfortable filling out, obviously, you shouldn't share anything you don't feel comfortable sharing, but anything else, I recommend filling it out.
10. 10 Profile Section: Services and Offerings: So the next step here is services and offerings. And here we go, services and offerings. Now, the first one is services, which you have to mention the services you provide. And you can fill out any service that you feel you can provide. Translation, project management, edit, proofreading. You might not feel like you want to provide Project Management, at least not at the beginning or maybe some of these other ones. So don't feel the need to fill it out or fill out as many as possible or what have you just fill out what you're comfortable filling out and look by enlarge. Translation is the main one that people will be looking for unless you're specialize in something like software localization or what have you, but otherwise, that's the main thing to worry about. And however, here when you get to fields of expertise, it's a different story. Here I recommend filling it out as much as possible. And so you can fill out your top 10 fields and specialties, up to 30 more fields in which you work as working and in other fields that interest you as interests. And so as you can see, I've filled it out pretty much to the max. And I recommend doing that because a lot of times when people are searching for translators, they will actually specify that they want someone in that specialty or working in that field. And so the more of these you have filled out, the better it is. Once again, obviously, you should only fill out things you feel comfortable and you'll notice I didn't fill out anything, say medical because I will absolutely not work in the medical field. I just don't feel comfortable there. Right. But the fields of expertise and the specialty fields that I do feel comfortable in, I try to be as comprehensive as possible and fill in as much of it as I can. And I recommend you do the same. And down below you'll see software and CAT tools here also, I recommend filling out whatever you feel comfortable with. A lot of these might seem obvious by the way, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, what have you still add them here and fill them out because clients never know and especially when they're hiring you online and they can't meet you face to face. It just helps him reassurance them that you know what you're doing when it comes to basic computer programs. And then once again, you can save and update your profile.
11. 11 Profile section: Languages: So the next step is languages. And here once again is pretty self-explanatory, but you fill out the languages that you can work in. Now. English, native, Italian, native. And I fill this out earlier on so you know what my languages are. I also add in French and Chinese. I haven't set proficiency levels yet. And quite frankly, I've done this earlier, but I'm not accepting any work in French or Chinese, so it doesn't matter. My language pairs right now I only have Italian to English and I have the services that I performed here. And then if you have any credentials, obviously you should add your credentials as well. A word or two about language pairs. A lot of people try to add as many language pairs is they can't hear. I recommend not doing that. And specializing to a few language pairs here, I only have one for a while. I also had French to English. But that was it. Because the moment you start having too many language pairs, it starts looking at, if I had decided to add Chinese as a language pair here, then it would start looking weird if I had a time, French and Chinese people might start questioning how good my Chinese is. First of all, and then think, oh, well, if they're including Chinese, who knows how they're Italian and French are and may be, you know, he's just putting any language he can. If you seriously see people with 789 language pairs here, and you start wondering how good they really are these language pairs. So look, this is obviously a judgment call on everyone's part, but I recommend keeping these two fewer. Actually, another thing I should mention here is that you can edit your rates here there's another section, which is the financial section where it talks a bit more about rates. But here you can specify your rates in each pair if you wish. If you do, I recommend maybe putting them a bit on the high side. And this is only because when you apply for each job, you can actually give a rate for each job. And it tends to look good if you have a general rate that's kinda of higher, but then you give a bit of a lower rate for the client because it kind of sounds like you're giving them a good deal. Again, this is just a judgment call, but in my experience, that's been that's been the case.
12. 12 Profile Section: Financial: So here under Financial, there are several things you can do. Once again, you can fill out your general rate. And this is general for all languages. If you only have one language pair like I do, then it'll be the exact same thing as filling out for it for that language. Once again, I recommend putting it sort of on the high side and then you can always lower it later for each client if you wish. I recommend showing it to outsourcers only and not to everyone. Just because if you show it to everyone, then people can Google it as well. It's up to you. I prefer having outsources only see it, and then show rates and my profound directory, this is up to you however you want to show it. Payment methods excepted, add as many as you can and you feel comfortable with, remember, if you have PayPal, it means you can add all these credit cards to PayPal. Credit card payments can occur via PayPal. So if you have PayPal add credit cards as well, and the more you have, the better it is in terms of people paying you and it makes it easier for them to pay you, which is always a good thing.
13. 13 Profile section: Professional Experience: So now in professional experience, we have a couple of sections. First of all, length of experience. Here you want to show how many years you've been working and you can click on automatically increase any calculates it based on the year that you enter here. So just fill that out. By enlarge the more experience you can show, the better, but you have to have other things to show for it. If you have, say, 17 years of experience, but you don't have any ratings than it looks a bit odd, or if you have nothing in your portfolio, then it looks a bit odd. So be truthful. Because if you, if you're not a kind of comes out when people look a bit more into your details. Now in terms of portfolio sampled translations, it says it's encouraged. I encourage it as well, put as many as you can, as you can see, I've quite a few. Most of them are tying to English. I have some French English, I think I also had one yeah, I have one Spanish to English because for a while I was offering that as well. The majority are in Italian to English and I tried to add them when I have something slightly different or a different type of translation text that I worked on that I feel comfortable with, and I'll add it to my portfolio just so they can see it. I recommend having at least three portfolio translation sample translations here so that people can get an idea as to what you've worked on in the past. By the way, anything you've worked on in the past can go here. It doesn't you don't necessarily need to pick something that we worked on through pros.com or even that you got paid for as long as you perform the translation yourself, even if we would volunteer work or find nothing do with pros.com, you can absolutely add it here. They make it very simple to add new translations, copy and paste the source texts, target text. You can give it a title and you can specify what field it is, et cetera, et cetera, and then you just add it. They've also added a video sample. This is more for interpreters. And so if you're a translator, don't worry too much about this. Now as you can see, the website is always changing and this was not here. The last time that I went on this page. And translator education is rather new as well. So I can fill this out right now. I have a master's degree and I can specify which school it is, although I'm pretty sure it's already somewhere in my profile. My professional objectives, career interested, just starting out Sam, experienced, experienced veteran. I'll just say veteran. Obviously, you should put whatever you feel is best. I would recommend not putting interested if you're just starting out, but just starting out, at least it shows that you're serious about this. And once you have a little bit of experience, click on Sammy, experienced. But obviously if you don't feel secure enough, then you can do just starting out interested. I'm afraid it might affect you negatively. And so, yeah, once you get when you do the hover over, it says not yet working in the industry. So I would avoid that if you're interested in getting jobs here, I'm interested in using probes.com in order to, and I'll just fill this out briefly. You can obviously go through it and see what you want to fill out.
14. 14 Profile Section: Marketing & Promotion: Now we're on to the marketing promotions section. This is very important. In fact, you'll notice you can't click on it directly, but you have each of these sections. This is very important, especially at the beginning because your profile functions as a marketing tool that's basically your business card and you want to use this profile to get your new jobs. So pay very close attention to this. The first part is a tagline. Here. The tagline, I recommend putting something short and sweet that describes exactly what you do. Legal and business translator, I was even able to put in a couple of flags. Feel free to do that. I like it because it catches people's eye and this is how it shows up on my profile. And so you can do that to show the language combination. You aren't giving much space. And so remember, here, I ran out of space completely. It's already I was 0 out of 40 left. And so you want to make sure that you use it wisely. And in Italian I have ceratopsian and I got a comment, a charity, which basically means the same thing. I wasn't able to add the flags here because there wasn't any space for that. If you see here I have eight. Actually, I might be able to hear. So let's see how this works. Yeah, but I can't add a space after this or let's see if I can do this. And for some reason I'm missing one of the flags. There we go. It won't let me put that flag. Oh, interesting. So you really don't have much space here. I'm going to get rid of these and just leave it as it was. And but yeah, you can add your tagline here and give it some thought and also change it around every now and then. You might notice that different taglines get different responses and get you more jobs are fewer jobs and so feel free to change it around every now and then. Like I said, this might not seem that big of a thing, but it is quite important. And I would recommend keeping it short and sweet. And to the point, a lot of people tried to say very creative things and try to show off their creativity and say something like a wonderful translator or something along those lines, I recommend not doing that. It's kind of just wastes the limited real estate you have here.
15. 15 Profile Section: M&P Photo: The next point is the photo. The photo once again, is very important, I believe. And only for the fact that it increases trust, once again, they're hiring you online. They don't get to meet you. They don't get the shake your hand. They don't get to talk to you face to face and you might be clear on the other side of the world. So show a photo. This is a dorky looking photo of me. My wife took it right outside. And but it's served its purpose, right. Because it just shows me dress semi professionally and that's it. That's all it needs to do. By the way, the photo that I used to have before was just me sitting at basically a coffee shop and getting work done. And a lot of times that's how they envision you as a freelancer sitting at your computer getting work done. So if you're at your computer right now getting work done, you can turn on your webcam, take a picture and that'll work perfectly. Don't try to make it to stylistic and don't worry too much about looking good. You can look dorky just like I do. The purpose here is to look trustworthy and, and to show that you're someone that they will want to do business with.
16. 16 Profile Section: M&P Profile Greeting: So now we have an interesting section called the profile greetings. And here you can have a sample video. I put this sample video, which is not something I recommend you do because I just put an intro to my course, my profile. I use it for various things right now as you know, as you can see, I use it as my agency and also for my courses and stuff like that. But I would recommend actually putting a video of yourself just in terms of transparency. And it makes people feel more at ease because they know who they're working with. It can really be something brief once again and you can say, Hi, my name is so and so and I'm an Italian to English translator specializing and legal to business translations. Please feel free to contact me with any issues you might have or any questions I'm more than happy to work with you. Something like that, short and sweet, and feel free to say it in both languages. And that way people kinda get a feel for it and that's pretty much all you need. If you have other information you want to add, you can add it. Don't make it too long. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about stylizing it too much. It really can just be a brief greeting. And you can do it with your phone or your webcam.
17. 17 Profile Section: M&P Bio: Now we get to your bio, your bile. The way to think of your bio is to think of it as your cover letter. And you're probably used to applying for jobs and trying to find jobs either in the corporate world or in the freelance world. And very often you need to send a cover letter. This is your cover letter. And my recommendation is to add links to it. As you can see, I added quite a few here. And I said I'm a member of the Carolina Association of translators and interpreters. Even through my brief description of where I've worked on where I studied, I put links there as well and pretty much anywhere I can, I just put links. Another thing I recommend is to add your specializations here. I usually when I talk to people and go through their profiles, I recommend making them bullet points or listing them like this. It's very easy for people to see and that way right away they can see what you specialize in and what they can hire you for. Plus, if you have any publications, I recommend adding those as well because those always help. And if you have any publications obviously, and if you have any published works, then it very much helps to add them there. Even if they are not in both languages, even just one language. At least it shows that you know what you're doing when you're writing and it is ancillary to translation in that sense.
18. 18 Profile Section: M&P CV: So the next step is your CV or resume. And here this is just your standard resume. And once again, and I've mentioned this in other places before, but her resume as a freelancer, it's obviously very difference from as compared to your resume when you're applying for in-house jobs are in the corporate world. I have a whole other course, which is specifically how to build up your CV or resume if you are a freelancer or an entrepreneur. So I won't get into it too much. But just to tell you here to upload it. And if you have it in various languages, feel free to upload it in other languages. And here I recommend showing your CV to everyone. There's no reason not to show it, and it's a good way to market yourself out there. And so I usually recommend just sharing it with everyone.
19. 19 Profile Section: Data Security: So now we're getting into Data Security. This is another interesting section. And so you have several things here. First of all, you have the security procedures. So I recommend filling these out because quite frankly, you should be able to fill them out. These are things that you should be able to provide safe guarding of content. I take care to prevent confidential project files and contact from being accessed by unauthorized parties? No discussion. I do not discuss confidential project contact with unauthorized parties, et cetera, et cetera. And so I recommend basically going through the list and accepting anything you feel comfortable accepting. So here let's go to the full list. When you get to this full list, I recommend filling out this first page, definitely all of it. There's no reason you shouldn't feel comfortable filling out the stuff here on the first page, I take care to prevent confidential project files and contact for being accessed by unauthorized parties. I do not discuss confidential project content, et cetera, et cetera, and then fill out whatever you feel comfortable filling out. As you can see, I didn't fill out everything just because quite frankly, I couldn't be bothered. This was the main part that I recommend everyone fill out the handling and ownership of content files. And then once you do so, here I can show you how it shows up and says this person has a secure prokaryote under data security. And, and they need to be a paying member to click on it and see your secure PRO card. But that's basically enough to show that you have that secure prokaryote. Now to continue, if you scroll down here, it says personal data verification. And what I recommend here is if you made payment for Prozac com and use your credit card, it should already be verified. Basically uses that to verify you. And so that shows you are verified. And the way he shows up here is it says there's a check mark right here and it says verified member. And this helps a lot when people are looking at translators because it does pop up and show whether they are verified member or not.
20. 20 Profile Section: Feedback: The next section is feedback. This is something you don't have to worry about at the very beginning. However, once he gets started, you will want to have feedback and get feedback from clients, but we'll cover that a bit later.
21. 21 Profile Section: SEO: Then we get to the SEO section. Here you have the tags. I recommend filling out as much and as many of these as possible. The translator specialization, business, legal politics, travel, miscellaneous. Why? Because if people search for any of these words, hopefully my profile will pop up. And in terms of keywords, you can see I've coined a few year and I could probably even add more, but these are the ones that I filled out and I recommend filling out quite a few of them as well. You can have your preferred URL format. I don't think it matters all that much. I just keep mine on their profile and that's it.
22. 22 Profile Section: Profile Page: Now once you've done all this, I recommend going to prose.com slash profile. And this is here. Let's force the visitor view once again so you can see how it looks like two visitors. But when you have your profile here, here you see user message. I recommend filling something out here. What I usually recommend putting here is your most impressive facet, your most impressive trait, your most impressive thing that you can add if you have a degree from a certain university, if you worked for a certain company, if it's anything that's well-known or he volunteered for a certain organization or anything along those lines. Put that up there. If you're a published author, you can put that up there. Anything that you have, whatever is most impressive, put it here as a user message. And once again with this too, feel free to change it around every now and then and see if something gets better response than somebody else. Now scroll down to membership here. There we go. And here you can add membership to anything you happen to be a member of. And let's see, the Carolina Association of translators and interpreters. And here I have a coffee.com, which once again is the profile that I use here for for hiring people. But you can look through a long list here as well of all these associations. And by enlarge, these are translation associations are things that are similar to that. So stony association with interpreters and translators, et cetera, et cetera. If you are a member of any, I recommend adding it. And if you're not a member of any, I recommend looking into it and becoming a member because it can be very useful. The next thing I recommend doing here is to endorse the professional practices. And you absolutely want to do that once again because there's no reason not to. And so I would I mean, obviously read through it all and make sure that you do endorse them, but then make them do endorse them. And remember that this shows up on your profile. Here, endorses pros and cons professional guidelines. So you want to make sure that you do endorse the professional practices. Once again, just to show that you are honest person and a person that they feel more comfortable working with. And by enlarge at this point, just go through and make sure that you have more or less all the information you need and you want filled out, see if anything's missing or not. And but it should look more or less like this with everything filled out that I've mentioned. And if we forced the visitor view, this is more or less what it should look like as well. If it doesn't, then go back and fill out whatever needs to be filled out or change whatever it needs to be changed. Also, feel free to go look at other people's profiles just to get an idea as to what they did and see if it's something you want to add to your profile as well.
23. 23 Getting Your First Ratings : Reviews: I was chatting with this one translator who said she needed more reviews are ratings on her profile. And but, you know, it was obviously hard. She was on pros.com. It was hard to get a new translation jobs when she didn't have any ratings or reviews, but, you know, she ratings or reviews to get to get new clients, the usual chicken and the egg now, but she had already had some clients. It's just that they were not through the pros website and they were independently. She had these clients. And so I told her I was like, You can still get the reviews on pros and and on other websites. But mainly I'm pros. Well, I'll concentrate on, you know, even if you didn't do the job through pros and and so I kinda just wanted to show you that and walk you through it. So this is for all of you who have maybe done a translation job before, even if you didn't use the pros.com website. And you did you did a translation for anyone before and they're happy with the translation. You can still get a rating review on your prose.com website. And so I wanted to show you exactly how to do it. And I'm pro is that first of all, they call it the WWF, the willingness to work again. And so here's how you do it. You go, here, you go. Click under my WW way. And then you come here and they really make it very easy both for you and for the other client. So here you have under service providers, basically you just click on Request translator feedback. And I mean, that's it, you know, you write so here a bit of writing the email address and then but I just want to show you what happens. He just write out their email address, write out the name of the contact person and the company name. I think if you leave out the company name and you probably need that actually for the Prozac on Blackboard. Let's see if this works actually, I'm curious. Yeah, it still works. So all you need is the e-mail address and the name anyway. So as you can see, it's very easy and then we'll pops up. You basically fill out their name and e-mail address and then you and then they write it out for you. Even they said I appreciated the opportunity to work with you if you're satisfying my service, please consider entering translator feedback for me, blah, blah, blah. And then when they receive this, all they have to do is either click yes or I prefer not to give feedback. So you either get a yes, unwilling to work again or nothing that, you know, there's there's nothing there. And so it's kind of a win-win for you. And so anyone, you've already done a translation for, what I usually do is I email them ahead of time. Said, I'm going to ask you for a WWE, a four for this reading thing. And I say, You know, it's just an e-mail and it's very easy. All you have to do is click Yes. And if you want, you can leave any comments he want. But but yeah, that's how it's done and it's very easy both for you and for the client. So there's no reason not to do this from any client you've had any one you've performed a translation for. It doesn't matter if it's an established company, are not as he saw. And as long as they're happy with the translation, you might as well send them this and then they can give you a rating or review, which as I said, when you're first starting out as the most important thing, then you have your review. It's as simple as that and really there's not much more to say about it. So hopefully you're able to use this. If you've ever performed a translation for anyone, you can definitely use this and they can leave you a WWE and they can, you know, and also leave a review or whatever it might be.
24. 24 Kudoz Points: How many kudos points should you have in order to be recognized, in order to be found and chosen in order to pop up in a search for translators. Well, first of all, I should probably cover what kudos points are. Here is how kudos works. It's under terminology. So basically if you go under, say, term search, you enter a term or a phrase. I'm going to, I don't know, ax to grind and let's see what pops up. An ax to grind. You have it here in Spanish, you have it in Hungarian, you have it in German and all these things. So what happens here is basically what happened is someone wrote here ax to grind and was asking for the translation. And because, you know, like with these terms, very often they can be different depending on the situation, depending on the formality, depending on et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So anyway, this person asked the English term or phrase and ax to grind and wrote rather than optic assailant. Okay, the Spanish, it's not my language, but basically it shows the thing in English about a company. And it says with an ax to grind. So in this situation they're asking how should I translate an ax to grind bot, bot. And here a couple of people responded. And they said that, uh, and then they gave the explanation as to why someone else said they agree. And so they said thank you. Someone else wrote this and with the explanation why. And then they wrote thank you. And then someone else wrote this. And then with the explanation why? Now, when you do this, you get these points for kudos points, where would it for this answer? And the way you get the answers that whoever asked the question then decides that that's the right one and that's the one they're going to choose. So they decided based on ad was, was the one that they chose. And so that means they get 4 kudos points. I don't think these other people get any points even though this one got someone to agree. So they've got a plus one, you only get the points if the person asking the question agrees that that's what they needed, and so then they give you the points. Anyway, that's the way kudos points works. It's basically when you go answer questions that people might have about a certain expression or something along those lines. And, and, you know, it'll always be like either a new term or a different term or using a different context and you help them out and then you add kudos points. That's the way you get him. Okay? Now, why would you do this? Well, first of all, a lot of people do it. I mean, you know, and I did it as well just because it's interesting and keeps you in practice and it really helps out. But it also gives you these kudos points. If you give the right answer, then you get kudos points. I won't go through how you get 34. That depends on how on how sure you are of your answers and stuff like that. But anyway, you get these kudos points. So what do you do with these kudos points? These are actually very important and I want to show you why. Say, now forget all this and say I'm an agency and I'm looking for a good translator. Let's go. So what I'm gonna do is go here under translators and interpreters, I could just post a job and find a translator that way. But actually, I more I do this more often and it really depends on what you're trying to search for it. If you're desperate for a job or if you're looking for translators now I do this even if I have a job because that way I can control who I, who sees my post. So let's, let's choose something very common, Arabic to English translation. And so what I'm gonna do now is I'm searching for an Arabic to English translator, right? So I click Search. And I get these people here. Now how are they sorted? They're sorted by kudos points. And because, you know, I don't know, I actually disagree with pros. I think they should be sorted more on how many reviews and ratings they get. But that's the way it is. They're sorted and kudos points. So this person who has two thousand, six hundred and fifty four hundred pairs is going to show up first. And then these people show up later because they have, as you can see, fewer and fewer kudos points, although these are still quite a few. Now, what I recommend is being able to have enough kudos points so that you can pop up on this first page. Because then what happens is a lot of people will pick, in fact, they might just click on this and then email these 25 people and see who e-mails back and say, I have this job available, are you available what your price be? And then they see who gets back. Unfortunately, all of these people on these other pages won't get this message. Only these first 25 people will. So if you can show up on the first page, that's best. You might think, okay. How am I going to get this number of kudos points? There's no way even 252 that's answering so many questions. And that's true. And the solution to that is, frankly, if you go back to here, usually what people do actually, so they put in all this, at least usually what I do is if I have a translation, I might then specify like say it's marketing. I wanted to translate a marketing pamphlet. Then I specify I want a marketing translator because I don't want medical or legal or anything like that. I want to marketing translator. So what happens? Now? I have the same thing and it's sorted by kudos points. But if you see now there's only eight in the field and it's sorted by how many they have in the field. Not by the pair. The pair is a language pair, but the number in the field is how it's sorted and suddenly it's a lot more attainable. Remember that one question got a kudos points. Well here we have eight in the field. That's two questions. You answer three questions correctly, then you'll be at the top of this list. So that's why you shouldn't despair. Obviously, it'll depend on the language combination and on the specialty, on how popular they are. Like. If I take something else, I don't like Akkadian for a K12 English. Let's do it any because I, I'm gonna imagine they're not too many Akkadian to English translators. In fact, there's one, this person has 0 and they're paired. They don't need to worry about getting kudos points because if anyone needs and Akkadian trans translation, this is your only choice, right? And so that's why it really depends on your language combination and then on the specialty that you're going to choose after that. So just keep this in mind. I would say a good exercise will be to go to your language combination with your specialization and see how many kudos points people have. And that'll give you a good idea of how many kudos points you should get. And then, and so these are the top specializations, but people can get a bit more in detail here, play around with it a bit and see where you should concentrate. Because maybe you concentrate, maybe now you're concentrating on marketing, but there are too many people there. But maybe you could be concentrating on linguistics and then you pop up higher on the list. Or maybe you should at least answer a couple of questions in linguistics. So you do pop up high on that list. I would just play around with it anyway and see what you can do. Because once again, pros for some reason, organizes their translators by kudos points. So kudos points ends up being very important for when people are looking for you directly and when people are searching for you directly.
25. 25 Bonus Example of a job posting: So I recently, as you know, I'm a translator and I also have an agency where every now and then I need to work with other translators to for certain jobs. And recently I had this job that I posted on probes because I was looking for a translator there. The language combination was a tying to English. And as you might know, this is my my language combination. But anyway, for various reasons I need to hire someone. So I just put on pros and I'll just go through what I did quickly just to give you an idea. Very simply wrote around 5000 words business. I didn't write the language combination because when you write the posted already comes out the language combination. So if people are also signed up for the pros.com email alerts, they'll have already entered the language communists anyway. So there's no need to do it there. It's just very simple to the point. Job description, I have a file of around 5000 words entitled quarterly assurance guideline, bla, and Italian to be translated to English. If you're interested, please let me know your price as well as whether you'll be able to complete it by Monday, end of day, then in parentheses might have to split this up, but I don't want to. Then here at the bottom I have please write in quotation marks, it tied to English QA in your subject line. And I put it there in quotation marks to make it quite clear. And I sent this out. There's some more information, the exact volume of words and the sample texts. But I say translating is not required just to give an idea, so people have an idea when they apply. So as you can see here, I got 21 quotes for this job. And I want to show you something interesting. So here's what I did it trying to English Q and a in your subject line. And it's just a, it's just a very simple thing to follow that I like to add and I'm going to show you the reason why I add this. I'm gonna do this because I'm not very good at editing and I don't want to show people's names or anything. So I think if I do this, it should be fine. Yeah, there we go. So these are all the quotes to 21 quotes that I received. And as you can see, they all have different different subjects and different prices that they give and different prices per word, stuff like that. And you know, this Y1 either names. But I want to show you something interesting. If I do This, find try to find on the page it tying to English. Q and a. I find it says it finds eight examples. This is out of 21 quotes. However, the eight examples also include the part down there. So here out of the fact, so yeah, it's exactly half. But which means for results, sorry, I'm talking a bit in circles here, but because I'm kind of thinking out loud anyway, these are the quotes that I don't want scroll down too much because down here below you have the full quotes where they actually write down the full pair of reference producing cells. These here. At the top though it just shows that subject and the price per word and then also their name and some other information there to the left. But I'm not going to show that right now. So anyway, going back to this, remember I said please put a time to English QA in the subject line. And but look at all these subject lines. No one's put it in except here, here. Here. And that's it. Three. Yeah. So three people put Italian to English. Q. And a. I mean, I because I see this Italian to English. Q. And a. Look, I'm going to count this as well, because quite frankly, yeah, I guess they just didn't copy and paste it, but whoever it is, wrote it, but so will count for it. Time to English. Q and a. In the subject line, no one else has it. Everyone else has, you know, other in fact here English to Arabic translator. I don't know why that would be relevant, but everyone else just has different things and obviously didn't read the instructions. So this to me is a great litmus tests because out of these 21 quotes now I only have four I need to consider because the other ones obviously are not paying attention to the till and they're not really following the instructions. So what do I do here? I I basically take these four ones that said a time to English. Q and a. Here's the first one, and that's their way per word. The second one, where there were a per word or price for translation plus F3 proofreading. Okay. And then, I mean, I kind of expect that from a translator. You know, it's but anyway, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It trying to English Q&A here, there's no price entered, which by the way, do not do. If you're, you know, when someone puts a job on prose, then that means that they, you know, they're ready to hire someone. They need to hire someone quickly. You don't want to add extra steps that they have to go through to figure out the price and all that. So, you know, this person is pretty much out as well. And then, and then here, here's the last one which has quite a high price actually. Oh, probably because it's a rush job express delivery anyway. Also plus QA I just want to QA in the title and it's because that's part of the title of the business document than he is to be translated. It's not that I wanted I don't know what that means exactly anyway. So out of these four quotes, so out of the 21 quotes that I received only for actually followed the instructions to have the title end. And then after that I can still delete one because it didn't have a price per word. So only three out of the 21, that's 1 seventh of all the, while the quotes I received are ones that I'm actually going to consider. And anyway then I won't go into it because actually one of them didn't have correct grammar and their English. So that was easy to take out and then there were only two left. So and in fact, yeah, the one that gave a really high price was too high and said, yeah, this is a high price for a rush job, but I mean, it's too high that and in fact, I think in his description he then says 0.15 Euros. But look, my point is this, even before reading the full description of what they write, I was able to whittle it down so much just by having that simple instruction. So that's why I'm telling you, please follow the instructions just by following the instructions of what the people want when they're hiring will really put you above the pack. And surprisingly so. And so, you know, simple things follow the instructions and I've mentioned is also before, many times have correct English. You know, don't make spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes when you write to people, have someone else look over it if you have to. But this job is it tied into English? I mean native English speakers. So if you're making mistakes in your English here, then forget it. And then, and then, yeah, don't add extra steps that people have to go through. So don't do this where you don't enter a price. You have to enter a price. You can later put in the description, say this is a rush job prize, so this is this at that price or whatever. If there's flexibility, that's fine. But at least enter some sort of price so, you know, we don't have to then ask you for it and all that because I did later check this person's description. Once again, I'm not scrolling down to the descriptions because it'll show their name and info and all that. But this person's description, she didn't say any price. You know, she just gave a whole lot of information with no price. And so anyway, I just wanted to share this and just to show that, just by making sure things are correct, by doing a little bit of quality control before you send these emails out and before you send these requests, responses to request for quotation, like just a little bit can really put you ahead of the pack. Because here, just literally following the instructions makes sure that you do better than, you know, it's better than six-sevenths of the people that you know. And and because only one out of seven actually follow the instructions correctly. So anyway, I just wanted to share that with you. I find it quite interesting and, you know, just to show you that by doing things correctly can really put you ahead of the pack. And, and of course then later you need to do a good job with the translation and all that. That goes without saying, but, you know, to make sure that you can actually follow instructions and you pay attention to detail. That really helps me to see what kind of a translator you are. And so you really should do stuff like that.