ProZ.com

ProZ.com Inc.
Type of business Private
Type of site
 Social network service
Available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, etc.
Founded Syracuse, New York (1999)
Area served Worldwide
Owner Henry Dotterer
Founder(s) Henry Dotterer
Employees 16 (2014)
Slogan(s) The translation workplace
Website ProZ.com
Alexa rank Negative increase 4,316 (April 2014)[1]
Commercial Yes
Registration Required
Users 573,554 (June 2012)
Launched November 1999
Current status Active

ProZ.com is a membership-based website targeting freelance translators. Founded in 1999,[2] it is mainly used for posting and responding to translation job offers. As of 23 September 2014, ProZ.com reports more than 720,008 registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.[2]

The site is available in more than 45 languages and is being localized in 35 other languages,[3] although localization is not complete for many languages, the default setting being English. QuantCast reports ProZ.com has 220k monthly unique U.S. visitors.[4]

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.[5][6]

Features and information

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.[7] 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 are its terminology questions, asked and answered by users; more than 2 million term translation questions have been answered via the site.[8]

The website features reputation systems: WWA for translators[9] and the BlueBoard for outsourcers.[10]

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.".[11] (That rate information has since been made public.[12])

A Guardian blog article published in April 2012 referred to ProZ.com as "the world's largest translator organisation".[13]

On September 30, 2009 the site organized a virtual conference that attracted a large number of attendees.[14] Annual virtual translation conferences have been held since then, and are open to anyone with a registered profile on the site.

Scams

Numerous cases of scamming and identity theft (including large-scale data harvesting[15]) have been reported and preventive measures taken to address the problems.[16]

Sites with comparable features

ProZ.com leads its major competitors in the segment of translation websites, such as TranslatorsCafe.com, TranslationDirectory.com, TraduGuide.com, TTMEM.com in two major metrics, volume of activity and registered users.[17]

Cooperation with non-profits

ProZ.com has contributed programming services and a work platform, and access to its database of translators to the non-profit group Translators Without Borders.[18] It also cooperated with non-profit Ashoka, and has sponsored events held by the American Translators Association[19] and others in the past.
In particular, ProZ.com is hosting and powering the translation platform[20] 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.

References

  1. ↑ "Proz.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-04-01.
  2. 1 2 "About ProZ,com". ProZ.com. Retrieved 17 July 2011.
  3. ↑ "Localization control center". proz.com.
  4. ↑ "ProZ.com". quantcast.com. Retrieved 17 July 2011.
  5. ↑ "ProZ.com guiding principles". proz.com.
  6. ↑ "Frequently Asked Questions - ProZ.com". proz.com.
  7. ↑ "ProZ.com (in Spanish)". El Cuaderno de Bitácora. ASETRAD. Retrieved 17 July 2011.
  8. ↑ Phil Goddard (21 January 2010). "The power of ProZ". ITI Bulletin. Retrieved 17 July 2011.
  9. ↑ "Frequently Asked Questions - ProZ.com". proz.com.
  10. ↑ "The Blue Board". proz.com.
  11. ↑ Inc. Magazine http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080401/what-are-you-trying-to-say.html
  12. ↑ Rates charged by ProZ.com translators http://search.proz.com/employers/rates
  13. ↑ The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2012/apr/11/volunteers-translation-language-health-messages
  14. ↑ TrànslationWörks http://www.translationworks.co.uk/tworks_eng/2009/10/prozcom-1st-virtual-conference.html
  15. ↑ Lingvopoint Steals Identities of Proz Users
  16. ↑ "Translator scam alerts - ProZ.com". proz.com.
  17. ↑ "Oct Translator Portal Proz Aims for Enterprise". Global Watchtower. Retrieved 17 July 2011.
  18. ↑ TCWorld http://www.tcworld.info/index.php?id=173
  19. ↑ American Translators Association 46th Conference sponsors
  20. ↑ Harvard International Review http://hir.harvard.edu/youth-on-fire/translation?page=0,2
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