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ProZ.com

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ProZ.com Inc.
Type of businessPrivate
Type of site
Social network service
Available inEnglish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, etc.
FoundedSyracuse, New York (1999)
Area servedWorldwide
OwnerHenry Dotterer
Founder(s)Henry Dotterer
Employees29 (2020)[1]
URLProZ.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationRequired
Users1,118,765 (October 2020)[1]
LaunchedNovember 1999
Current statusActive

ProZ.com is a membership-based website targeting freelance translators. Founded in 1999,[1] it is mainly used for posting and responding to translation job offers. As of 20 October 2018, ProZ.com reports more than 960,000 registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.[1]

The site is available in more than 45 languages and is being localized in 35 other languages,[2] although localization is not complete for many languages, the default setting being English. QuantCast reports ProZ.com has 220,000 monthly unique U.S. visitors.[3]

The website is not restricted to professional translators and hosts a number of semi-professional and amateur translators. It is open to anyone, without proof of competency or legal registration,[4][5] although members can submit degree certificates and other qualifications for verification.

Features and information

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ProZ.com is based in Syracuse, New York, United States, and it has offices in La Plata, Argentina and Kharkiv, Ukraine.

The site features a virtual community of translators and offers a wide range of resources. Registered users are able to broadcast their professional identity as translators on the internet and receive job offers in the mail with the appropriate language combinations. Registration is required for most services. It also provides discussion forums and online glossaries.[6] Although much of the website requires paid membership in order to be used, and the website receives income from paid advertising, the site has been developed with the help of unpaid volunteers. One remarkable feature is its terminology questions, asked and answered by users; more than 2 million term translation questions have been answered via the site.[7]

The website features reputation systems: WWA for translators[8] and the BlueBoard for outsourcers.[9]

Inc. Magazine rates the service as "a helpful resource for small translation projects" but because only paid members could see the going rates, "non-members may have trouble figuring out how much to offer.".[10] (That rate information has since been made public.[11])

A Guardian blog article published in April 2012 referred to ProZ.com as "the world's largest translator organisation".[12]

On September 30, 2009, the site organized a virtual conference that attracted a large number[vague] of attendees.[13] Annual virtual translation conferences have been held since then, and are open to anyone with a registered profile on the site.

ProZ Pro Bono

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ProZ Pro Bono
Formation2022 December
Legal statusnon-profit
Purposehumanitarian language support
Director
Andrew Morris
Parent organization
ProZ.com
Websitehttps://www.probono.proz.com/

ProZ.com launched its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative, ProZ Pro Bono, in 2022,[14] a non-profit[15] that helps non-profit organizations and humanitarian causes overcome language barriers by providing translation and interpreting services on a volunteer basis at no cost.[16][17] The initiative serves non-profit organizations worldwide, allowing them to address multilingual communities and allocate their resources to their primary missions.[18][19] The program aims to bridge linguistic gaps for those who might otherwise struggle to provide or gain access to essential information and services by fostering a global community of dedicated volunteer professional translators and interpreters.[20][21]

The freelance professionals who make up this network volunteer their time and skills to support a variety of humanitarian causes. Proz Pro Bono uses a peer review system,[22][23] and, the translation and interpretation work is performed by language professionals who are registered members of ProZ.com.[24][14]

Since its inception in 2022, ProZ Pro Bono has translated 7 million words (as of June 2024) [25] in various fields, and have offered language support to several small to large-scale non-profit humanitarian organizations including, the International Rescue Committee,[17] Progressive International,[26] UN, Choosing Earth,[27] Wiki Med Project, Ma Petite Planète, UNICEF, Earth Hero, Give Directly, Treetops Collective, SOS Children's Villages and Aid Global.

Cooperation with non-profits

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Apart from their own ProZ Pro Bono initiative, ProZ.com has also contributed programming services and a work platform, and access to its database of translators to the non-profit group Translators Without Borders.[28] It also cooperated with non-profit Ashoka, and has sponsored events held by the American Translators Association[29] and others in the past.

In particular, ProZ.com is hosting and powering the translation platform[30] used by Translators Without Borders to deliver over 2.5 million words in 2011 and 4.5 million words in 2012, donated by volunteers to humanitarian organizations. This includes the translation into several languages of Wikipedia medical articles as part of the WikiProject Medicine.

Scams

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Numerous cases of scamming and identity theft (including large-scale data harvesting[31]) have been reported and preventive measures taken to address the problems.[32]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d "About ProZ.com". Retrieved 2020-10-21.
  2. ^ "Localization control center". proz.com.
  3. ^ "ProZ.com". quantcast.com. Archived from the original on 21 October 2012. Retrieved 17 July 2011.
  4. ^ "ProZ.com guiding principles". proz.com.
  5. ^ "Frequently Asked Questions - ProZ.com". proz.com.
  6. ^ "ProZ.com (in Spanish)". El Cuaderno de Bitácora. ASETRAD. Archived from the original on 25 July 2011. Retrieved 17 July 2011.
  7. ^ Phil Goddard (21 January 2010). "The power of ProZ". ITI Bulletin. Retrieved 17 July 2011.
  8. ^ "Frequently Asked Questions - ProZ.com". proz.com.
  9. ^ "The Blue Board". proz.com. Over the years, there have been repeated allegations of negative reviews on the BlueBoard being removed by Proz under pressure from outsourcers. Users have also reported being pressured to remove negative reviews themselves in return for satisfaction of their outstanding payments.
  10. ^ Inc. Magazine http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080401/what-are-you-trying-to-say.html
  11. ^ Rates charged by ProZ.com translators http://search.proz.com/employers/rates
  12. ^ The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2012/apr/11/volunteers-translation-language-health-messages
  13. ^ TrànslationWörks http://www.translationworks.co.uk/tworks_eng/2009/10/prozcom-1st-virtual-conference.html Archived 2012-09-17 at archive.today
  14. ^ a b "About Us". Proz Com Pro Bono. Retrieved 2024-06-26.
  15. ^ Morris, Andrew. "ProZ.com's Pro Bono Project". go.proz.com. Retrieved 2024-06-26.
  16. ^ Crowdin (2023-11-22). Translating for Good: ProZ Pro Bono's Journey with Crowdin. Retrieved 2024-06-26 – via YouTube.
  17. ^ a b "ProZ Pro Bono partners with the IRC in Denver for an innovative way to give back | International Rescue Committee (IRC)". www.rescue.org. Retrieved 2024-06-26.
  18. ^ Crowdin (2023-11-20). Case Study | How ProZ Pro Bono uses Crowdin localization software. Retrieved 2024-06-26 – via YouTube.
  19. ^ Morris, Andrew. "A Global Mosaic: ProZ.com's pro bono project". MultiLingual.
  20. ^ ProZ Pro Bono (2023-12-07). Intro to ProZ Pro Bono. Retrieved 2024-06-26 – via YouTube.
  21. ^ "20 Ways to Support Humanitarian Causes Without Spending Money". Knowledge Netizen. 2024-03-23. Retrieved 2024-06-26.
  22. ^ "Board". Proz Com Pro Bono. Retrieved 2024-06-26.
  23. ^ "Proz Probono Stats". prozprobonostats.com. Retrieved 2024-06-26.
  24. ^ ProZ Pro Bono (2024-01-10). ProZ Pro Bono: Volunteer Voices. Retrieved 2024-06-26 – via YouTube.
  25. ^ "Proz Probono Stats". prozprobonostats.com. Retrieved 2024-06-27.
  26. ^ "Após anos de protestos contra uma fábrica de armas israelense, seu fechamento ocorreu através de uma ação direta". Progressive International (in Brazilian Portuguese). Retrieved 2024-06-27.
  27. ^ Choosing Earth on ProZ.com Pro Bono. Retrieved 2024-06-27 – via vimeo.com.
  28. ^ TCWorld "Translators without borders". Archived from the original on 2011-02-10. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  29. ^ American Translators Association 46th Conference sponsors Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine
  30. ^ Harvard International Review http://hir.harvard.edu/youth-on-fire/translation?page=0,2 Archived 2013-07-19 at the Wayback Machine
  31. ^ "Lingvopoint Steals Identities of Proz Users". Archived from the original on 2016-07-29. Retrieved 2015-06-12.
  32. ^ "Translator scam alerts - ProZ.com". proz.com.
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