Comments on: ProZ.com Translation Contest

By: alexie

alexie — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:10:13 +0000

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?

By: chuboy

chuboy — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:09:38 +0000

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

By: Jianjun

Jianjun — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:37:04 +0000

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.

By: Gonul

Gonul — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:58:44 +0000

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.