Besides that, I insist that the best time (by ‘best time’ I mean a period in which online outsourcers and suppliers have almost ready-made mutual trust) for online translation marketing is going away if not completely over. ProZ as such a portal has met its bottleneck and now is struggling to keep up the revenue by reducing premium member fees to less than 60 USD/year for China-based translators and creating self-issued certificates or badges for paying members to attract new clients. 

Despite of the efforts, however, online clients probably will soon no longer trust anyone simply because she/he has a nice-looking picture, a glamorous profile or a flashy website. In a cyber translation outsourcing market where even certificates can be self-made or even faked, they will need to grab something concrete about that person, something they can prove as reliable, before contacting the freelancer. More and more wise outsourcers now know a simple rule: Established translators never lack jobs. So these translators are unlikely to stay online everyday looking for new clients and new projects and pay this fee or that fee to get job opportunities.

On the other hand, if a freelancer started earlier like from 2001 to 2005 (when many online swindlers hadn’t even realized there was a market that they could also easily cheat in), and if she/he could keep her/his good quality and hence had retained a good client base, she/he should not feel much pain during this hard time. Having a large client base is like investment diversification (although this strategy is not doing very well at this time in the financial world as the global markets and sectors plunge indiscriminately ) – there are always long-term clients giving you enough jobs. 

If you work as a freelancer, lowering per unit rates won’t bring you out of the mire. Instead, it will kill your translation skills until one day your quality is ruined and you can never get any good clients. The theory behind this is quite simple: to earn enough with low rates, one has to overwork and for long hours, and this results in unavoidable lower quality. After a time, when it has become a habit, the translator can no longer provide quality services and never get good rates. This is a vicious circle. 

Therefore, don’t worry about other people’s low rates. Keep your rates and quality and the client will come back when those guys fail them time and again. And also don’t worry about those clients (agencies) that only accept low-cost offers without caring about any quality, they are swindlers themselves and will be kicked out of business after a while. 

Freelancers are individual business entities and all businesses need a sound development and risk management strategy. If one has knowledge about these and the necessary mechanism in place, she/he will regret less when financial disasters happen and it is a lifetime’s job to learn from these experiences.

At the time of writing, a new URL emerged and, according to the ‘official’ phishing site’s server status report, “c0mpics.info” is now the most active site that’s hoaxing not only MSN users, but ICQ users.

When you visit the phishing site (never do it!), a window pops up displaying content from ‘awesomeoffers.info’ (see picture below, click to display large image) saying, ‘We’re sorry! This offer is not available in your area. You will

be redirected shortly. If you are not automatically redirectly, please click here.’ Then you are served ads from various sources.

Thanks to our fellow netizens, sites such as jumphost.info, ther1ng.info, etc. were alerted as potential phishing sites by FireFox. But if you are using IE or Safari, the chances are you won’t see these warnings.

Personally I think MSN and ICQ should do their fair share of work and warn their users never trust any offline messages containing such links. That will be the most effective and proactive way to deal with these bad guys. However, each one of us who knows about the phishing attempt can also lend a helping hand by telling our MSN/ICQ or other IM buddies about this and report any such sites through FireFox or IE.

Here’s how:

FireFox:

When you are on that site, click on ‘Help’ -> ‘Report Web Forgery.’

French version, click on ‘?’ -> ‘Signaler un site contrefait…’

IE:

When you are on that site, right-click this icon on bottom status bar.

*UPDATE*

Good news. As on June 6, all phishing sites from the so-called ‘TST Management Inc.’ have been down. But I am not sure if they are simply banned by the ISP in Hong Kong and are in the process of finding other server locations. If you find any further information, please let me know. Thanks.

*UPDATE-1*

The phishing sites are back on again. A new one to watch:

“freakpics.info”

Actually it happened yesterday afternoon when I installed a plug-in that tampered with my .htaccess file. The install document was so badly written in some sort of English that in the end I was driven nuts and uninstalled it. I manually removed the part that it inserted into my .htaccess, but didn’t realize I probably mistakingly deleted/altered some of the old codes along the way.

The home page looked fine but all permalinks returned a ’404 Not Found’ error – and I didn’t find that until this morning when I checked visitor statistics! If you experience a similar problem, i.e. you can visit the home page of your database driven site (not necessarily WordPress) but each individual page returns a ’404 Not Found’ error, check your .htaccess file. It’s not your database problem.

Learn how to earn money using your blog

Fring promises encrypted data transfer when you submit credentials of these services through the mobile interface, giving you peace of mind.

Once you are logged in, it automatically imports all your contacts. A green icon means the contact is online and available. Away, busy or unavailable buddies are marked orange. When a buddy is offline, the icon turns gray.

Fring’s intuitive interface makes you feel at home the first time you use it. As you see in the photo above, Chinese characters in my MSN buddy’s name are nicely displayed.

Fring client is currently localized into 6 languages, including Simplified Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish. As they are still in Beta, I expect to see more languages over time and more professional translations.

Now Chinese users may feel confused when they see ‘On/Off’ under the ‘Show Fring Signature’, etc. menus being translated as “连接/断开”(Connect/Disconnect). Some other problems also need to be addressed.

How much bandwidth does Fring use and how about the sound quality?

Fring Support says each 1M bandwidth equals to 15 minutes of Fring call (Fring to Fring). I tried it on my EDGE plan. The bandwidth usage of the one-minute Fring test call was around 90K, and the sound quality was amazingly good! SkypeOut and SIP (I use FWD) calls, however, were not as satisfactory – in other words, you can’t use them for any serious communication and they use too much bandwidth. 3G/WIFI connections should give much better quality.

You can set Fring to run in the background if instant mobile messaging is important to you. When you receive a message or a call via Fring, it’ll alert you with distinctive tones. But the software does eat your battery. When I had it in the background for about 20 minutes, the battery became hot too.

Overall, Fring is still useful when you are traveling but suddenly have something urgent to discuss with your friend on MSN or you simply want to catch up with the Twitterati while waiting for your plane at the airport.

Fring website

The whole course will start with simple greetings and then extend into longer and more challenging situational modules. I plan to give a 5-10 minute class each week with accompanying text materials such as new word list, additional vocabulary and other relevant information.

Since the course will be a one-man show – at least in the beginning – to prevent listeners getting bored quickly, I will try to make each class as short, useful and interesting as possible. While I’m preparing (finding sound clips, writing syllabus, etc.) for the formal launch of the podcast, as always I appreciate any suggestions from you. Although this service is of an amateur nature, I’d like to ensure its quality.

Stay tuned!