ProZ.com Translation Contest

Mar 11 2008

ProZ.com Translation Contest

Published by Jianjun at 9:22 am under ProZ,work

A colleague asked me about ProZ Translation Contest some time ago. I think my reply to him may also help other people who are interested in it. So, after some editing, I put it here in my blog.

ProZ translation contest, or Proz.com Translation Contest, was first launched by ProZ.com on Feb 01, 2007. Now, after a year, there have been six such contests. From professional point of view, however, due to its business oriented nature, ProZ translation contest is not comparable to other professional translation contests. And it has many unique characteristics that are not commonly shared by such competitions:

To participate in ProZ.com Translation Contest, you have to be a ProZ member (in ProZ terms, the sacred title ‘member’ is only reserved for a paying guy, otherwise you are a free user). And, as far as I know, this is the only ‘qualification’ you need to take part in it. In other words, ProZ.com Translation Contest is something for ProZ members – a closed-door contest.
There is no fixed and qualified judging panel! Potentially anyone, even if a layman with no knowledge of translation, can vote. This time you don’t need to be a member!! And the translator who got the most votes wins! Certainly, this leaves open an option for a guy to call his friends from around the world to give him a vote! (You just need to take a few minutes to register a free ‘ghost’ account.) I remember in the xxxxth ProZ Contest, a guy posted in the ProZ Chinese forum publicly calling on friends to vote for him. And later he was indeed the winner. Maybe this is only a coincidence, but here is the loophole.
The ProZ translation contest is running like crazy, one after another in a row. Within a year, there have been six such contests! The winner is issued an electronic certificate with signatures from the contest organizer – a ProZ staff – and the founder of the site. So you have something to ‘prove’ your ability. I can’t remember any well-known professional level contests are running like this, with such a ‘commercially signed’ certificate.

I personally believe ProZ.com Translation Contest is too profit-oriented to produce a fair, balanced and professionally qualified result. Of course, in which direction the contest is going to develop totally depends on ProZ itself. If they want the contest to become professionally recognized world-wide, they should change that ‘pay-before-you-can-participate’ attitude as the first step.

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4 responses so far

4 Responses to “ProZ.com Translation Contest”

# Gonulon 11 Mar 2008 at 10:58 pm

Yes, I too agree that the Proz.com translation contest may not be fair. I have actually thought about entering the competition a few times myself, but never really had the time to compete from my workload! So I can’t really give an account of my experience with the contest, but I would prefer that at least the names of the participants in the contest are held anonymous for a more fair voting system.

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# Jianjunon 12 Mar 2008 at 10:37 am

Absolutely. And after each competition, the person who chooses the source text should give a thorough analysis of the article and point out the difficult points and how to cope with them. Many other contests have this procedure and the person who selected the source text should also provide her/his own translation as a standard sample.

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# chuboyon 07 Mar 2009 at 3:09 am

The annual contest organized by ProZ.com, which is the largest of all, gives an iPhone or something else to the winner, so I will join if I want one bad LOL

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# alexieon 14 Jan 2010 at 6:10 am

I agree totally.
As a ProZ member, I once took time to answer a few translation questions. Minutes later, I was astonished to find out my answers were already rated and commented by members, some of whose comments made little sense. After a closer look, I noticed some members working in pairs, rating other members’ inputs and agreeing to one-another’s comments, thus gathering points to climb the ProZ ladder. By the number of ratings from one such pair, I figured they surely spent more time rating others than doing translation per se. It smelled like a rat race.
Regarding ProZ in general, if a translator gets among the highest ratings, he gets lots of work. But what about the global quality of his work? Apart from satisfied clients who rarely master both languages, who rates his work, along which professional standards? His bank manager’s?

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