Getting jobs in Translator's Corner (or in any other translation site) implies generating trust
on your potential client, so he is convinced when hiring you.
Here you will find several tips and ideas to achieve this.
The document is split into 3 main sections:
Improve your Profile
Your profile is your visible face, your appearance in the eyes of the customer. It is all a client
can see about you, and it's your only chance to make an impression. Use it well. Ranking #1 in all our searches
is useless if clients run away when they see your profile.
Based on feedback from clients, this is what they value the most when looking at translator profiles:
Enter good highlights
Your highlights are the first thing a client will see, and they may be the last too.
It is worth spending a few minutes thinking up something that will catch their attention and encourage them
to continue reading.
Think about it...
What sets you apart from other translators?
What do clients normally say about you?
Don't enter generic stuff like "Highly motivated". That's boring, and they've seen it before.
Be specific, be original, and you will get their attention.
In general, the more highlights you can enter, the better you will look.
Enter your highlights in the Highlights Section of your Profile
Educational Background and Professional Experience
This is the second most important place in your profile. Don't neglect it.
Make sure you enter as much information as possible about your studies, courses you've taken, certifications
you obtained.
You also want to mention jobs that show off your experience.
Have you translated any novels lately?
Any important contract?
Office software that's widely recognized?
Anything that will make them say "Wow! He translated THAT?" is a winner.
Enter your Educational and Experience in the Resume Section of your Profile
Your Name and Picture
Showing your real name instead of a screen name gives credibility to your profile.
Try to get on the client's shoes. Who do you think will do a better job with that German contract?
Mr. Johann Van der Bilt?
Or Mr. "Lean Mean Translating Machine"?
Likewise, a picture can add a lot of reality to your profile. Human faces sell more than a bunch of text,
guaranteed.
Upload your Picture in the Resume Section of your Profile
Sample Texts
Another client's favorite.
This is your last chance to show off. Impress them with some non-obvious text you've translated.
The more sample texts you can enter, the more chances you have for the client to see something he can
relate to.
Don't spare efforts on this one. Enter 3 good sample texts and you'll see the results.
Enter your Sample Texts in the Sample Texts Section of your Profile
Get Rated
At Translator's Corner, we value your previous online experience.
If you have a profile at another translation site, please let us know, and we will give you points for it.
Ratings are very important in getting clients to trust you. No matter what you enter in your professional experience
description, showing some stars is much stronger, so don't pass up on this one.
Please note that we can only give you points for information entered by third-parties. If you send us a personal
website that says you've been translating for 20 years, we can't really use that.
However, if you point us to your profile in another site, that shows verifiable data like sign-up dates, customer
feedback (not entered by you), etc, we will credit you for it.
We also accept other types of proof. If you are a certified translator, you can e-mail us a scan of your certificate,
or pretty much any document that provides proof of your experience.
If you have already entered the address of your off-site profile, please double check whether you show
a rating on your profile. If you don't, it's possible that the address you gave us was not what we
were looking for (you should've received an e-mail from us).
If that is the case, please let us know and we'll fix it ASAP.
Enter the address of your profile at the bottom of the Resume Section of your Profile
All these tips will help the client trust you and contact you. But you also need to make sure
you show up in searches. Read on...
Improve your Ranking
Our ranking algorithm takes, above all, the 3 factors that clients look for the most:
Price, Time and Experience.
These are the most obvious ones, and they have plenty of incidence, but many other factors are taken into
account that you can influence. We will talk about this in the following section, but for now, it's important that you
remember the most important part:
Make sure you DO show up in searches for the services you provide!
We will only show your profile to clients that search for the services you provide. These may be
Translation, Proofreading, Website Localization, etc, over different Language Pairs.
If you don't explicitly tell us that you provide one of these services, you won't show up in searches
for those, because, to us, you simply don't do that.
So how do you specify what services you provide? Simple,
Load your rates for all of them.
We have noticed a lot of translators have specified that they speak 5 or 6 languages, and they
have only loaded one rate. This may be what was intended, but we believe we haven't made it clear enough
that they should load one rate per service they provide.
Now we've added a few hard-to-miss signs to let you know of this, so we hope this will improve, but please
double check your rates and make sure you will show up in all
the searches you intend to.
Load rates for all the services you provide in the Rates Section of your Profile
Now, besides being there, and besides polishing up your profile, the most important factors that you
can affect are the ones that we believe are
indicators that you will reply to clients promptly, so please read the following section carefully.
Improve your Response Timing
The most painful lesson we've learned since we launched the site has been seeing clients that
complete their searches, register on the site, contact one or more translators, and then never
get replies.
We've literally seen thousands of dollars in potential jobs that vanished because the client didn't get a timely reply,
so we're taking this part very seriously now.
You know and we know that 90% of all translation are due yesterday. Clients expect immediate
answers from translators, and we have designed the whole site precisely around this need.
Now we've added one more important piece: We will boost the ranking of translators that we believe
will reply promptly, and we will push down in the list those who might not.
What do you mean "We believe" will reply promptly?
It's exactly like that. We can't know whether you'll reply or not, but we can get hints by your past experience.
If you have not replied to jobs you've been contacted on, or you have taken a long time to do so, we'd expect
you to do the same in the future. The opposite is also true, of course.
Also, if you haven't logged on to the site in a year, we expect you will take longer to reply than someone
that logs on every week (or every day).
But don't despair. You CAN help your ranking even though you've never replied to a single e-mail. Read on...
Be online in ComConsole
This is the ultimate ranking-booster. There is nothing more immediate than being able to chat with the translator
on the spot so, following our immediacy logic, all translators that are Online in ComConsole at the time of the
search will rank FIRST. No exceptions.
Please note that is not being online at the site, it is being online at the
ComConsole Chat System, to allow clients to chat with you in real time.
To open ComConsole you can follow the link in My Corner
(or this link).
Also, for your convenience, you can just add ComConsole Launcher
to your favorites and you'll be able to get to it easily whenever you're looking for work.
Open ComConsole. Keep it Open. You will get more jobs.
Read more about ComConsole
Login to the site often
If for some reason you can't use ComConsole, we recommend you to log on to the site often.
Simply going to My Corner will suffice, this is just to let us know you're still there.
Again, if you don't do this, you will still show up in searches, but you'll rank better if
we've seen you around recently, because we believe you'll reply faster to clients.
Reply Promptly
Finally, the site will keep track of all the times you've been contacted, whether you've replied or not
and how quickly you did so.
Making sure you reply to clients, and preferably, doing so quickly will keep you ranking high.
That's all for now. Polish up your profile, Open ComConsole, and stay tuned, there are more news coming!