Another 13 reasons why a translator needs his website

13 reasons why a translator needs his website You should have your own website with a domain of your own, like www.frenchtranslator.net 1. It is like an online visiting card that you can refer people to in the cyber space. It is also an online brochure that contains information about your services. And it works 24 hours and 7 days. 2. Nearly half of the clients go to search engines for finding a translator, so you should be there also or else you loose them. 3. It gives a positive impression to your ustomers that you are a serious, established and professional translator. 4. You will earn more respect from clients. 5. You can set up your own e-mail with the name of your site only when you have a domain name and id. for your website. 6. Not using a free email id will show that you have invested in your business. 7. With your own site you can arrange for FTP for bigger files. 8. Your website can become a reference for your present clients. 7.Your website can provide contact details to your customers. 8.Your clients can also share you contacts with other colleagues by referring your website. 10. If you have your own website you can save a lot of time with new clients instead of explaining who you are and what you do. You may simply suggest that for more information they may look at your site. 11.Websites can be promoted over a period of time. Your site can bring you more clients if you are consistently promoting it. 12. Websites can be hosted in your domain with blogger/wordpress. For blogs it is very simple to add contents. More fresh contents will bring more traffic and more clients. 13. Please add your reason for having your own website

Are Translation Tests Helpful?

Are Translation Tests Helpful? Like any other industry, being a rookie at freelancing is a tough time and you are made to put up with many uphill tasks. Once such task that every freelancer, searching for jobs, faces is the ordeal of taking up tests for translation. But, does taking up such tests really result in getting you jobs is the golden question. Different agencies handle the proposition of hiring people to do their jobs in different manner. Some just go by the CV you have provided while others resort to screening using samples that you have provided or by checking with some references that you have given. Yet there are others that ask you to take up a test free of charge for evaluating you. From the agency’s point of view, such tests are justified saying that samples provided may not necessarily be yours while reference response can many a times be questionable. For this reason, they have to take up a test for evaluation. They say that they cannot provide a response to every person who takes up a test. While there are agencies that do provide a feedback to tests that are taken, there is an equal or a higher number of agencies that do not do this. For this reason, many freelancers get dejected by not receiving proper responses and in several cases receiving devious replies. This brings us back to the question- Do such tests result in providing you jobs? While it is a general opinion that such tests are nothing but a waste of time, there definitely is a small percentage of people who claim that they have landed up jobs by taking up tests before starting out. So, the proposition of taking up a test or not is a decision that has to be made by you. The only kind of safeguarding that you can do from your side is to try and check the credentials of the agency to see if you are not being taken for a ride by taking the prescribed test.

Practical Tips for Document Word Count

Practical Tips for Document Word Count As a freelancer, you will be receiving files in different file formats for translation. Since you are generally paid according to the number of words in the source text you would generally be expected to produce an invoice which states the number of words that are present in the original text and calculate the exact amount that needs to be paid multiplying the number of words with the amount paid per word. The problem arises if the file sent to you is a PDF document. If the PDF file has not been sourced from a scan, it is possible to convert this into text file and calculate the number of words. Since most PDF documents are scanned, it is not possible to calculate the exact number of words as it can be done in a .DOC file or a text file. Here are few practical tips that will help you if you are faced up with such a situation. 1. The easiest method is to request your client to send in a copy of the file that is in an editable version. But, in many cases this is not possible as it may not be available in this form. 2. Another simple alternative to use is to inform the client prior to taking up the project that you will be charging by the hour as it is not possible to get an exact word count. 3. Another practical method to get an approximate of the number of words is to randomly count the number of words in few particular lines and arrive at an average word count per line and then multiply it with the number of lines in the document to arrive at a final figure. 4. Another simple method is to inform the client that you would be taking the word count of the finished translation as it cannot be found out from source. However, this may not be accepted by many clients. 5. If you do not want to rely on any of the methods enlisted above, then you will need to invest in special software (Optical Character Recognition- OCR) to help you out. E.g.: Omnipage Pro, ReadIris Pro, Abbyy, Practicount, Anycount, etc. These simple and practical methods will definitely solve the problems of getting a word count on any PDF file formats that you might receive in the future.

How to find clients-2

The best and easier to get (clients) are Translation Agencies. There are many in the net. Working for known translation agencies is a safe way of having continued jobs, and secure payments. Use portals like translators cafe, go translators, traduguide, translatorsbase and others like ProZ.com Blue Board to choose clientele based on their ratings. They all have websites from where you can find their email. Look for sections as "Recruitment", "Career", "Jobs" and fill up the online form.

How to find clients?

How to find clients? It is indeed a secret nobody wants to disclose. The question often asked by fresh translators is how and where to find clients. For many people, word of mouth works, others leave their business cards. People do many things. There are many many ways. In subsequent posts I will explain some of these methods which are compiled by search in internet and other sources. =Ostom