Why to stick to your working areas

If you have chosen your translation career intentionally and consciously, you may call yourself a happy person, as you are busy with the job you like. But loving translation process doesn't mean you love translating everything. Choosing working areas is of great importance for translators. The ideal area of specialization must meet one and single criteria - it must be of personal interest for you. This can guarantee no stress and strong recognition for you and high quality for your clients. What else is needed for successful cooperation?
My personal interest can be described with a word, that had finally come to Russia and is rather popular here at the moment - that is "geek-chick".  IT, software, web, tech and all that staff - for "geek". Health, fashion, makeup and skincare - for the "chick" side.

What I'm happily working on now:

SAP software (IT+software+web)
Medical equipment (tech + software+skincare)
Sports web-site (web +health)


   

Contacting agencies - don't delete job post notifications from ProZ

Those, who are familiar with ProZ, receive notifications on job posts on regular basis. Some translators delete these mails without even reading, if the language pair or job type is not of their interest. And that is a mistake. Jobs posts at ProZ can be a great source of new clients. An agency you are registered in will contact you directly and will not post a job. So, that means, the outsourcer is new for you and there is a chance to let him know of your talent.
What do I do. I read every job post notification, go to this outsourcer's Blue Board and find a link to his web-site. Then I can see if this outsources can be a potential client for me. Some agencies have interesting blogs available at their web-sites, so this can be an additional source of info as well.

Delayed payments day

Traditionally the beginning of the month is the "excuse" time for freelancers. Today I have received three types of excuses for delayed payments. Here we go:

- we are updating our Moneybookers account
- we suggest accumulating invoices to save bank transfer charge
- we have different due date for your invoice 

Hi and bye to Paypal

I'd like to start my English version of "Crave for words" with the same topic I posted on at my Russian blog. That was about false statement of Paypal on their service in Russia.
The list of countries receiving full scope of service was published at the Paypal's official web-site under the Terms section and included Russia and Ukraine. The miracle was planned to happen on September 24. To say, that all the Russian freelancers were at the peak of celebration, is to say nothing. So happy was I thinking of all the US agencies I could work with from then and on. Driven by this enthusiastic mood I accepted a couple of jobs from the agencies, that were stuck to Paypal and denied the existence of other payment methods.
The jobs were done before deadline, the PMs were sweet and optimistic and the sun was shining. On the "miracle" day I decided to transfer a lump of about $300 from my US Paypal account to the Russian one. I prepared to exclaim something like "It's alive!" after clicking "send" button, when the same old "Sorry, this function is not available for Russia" and blah-blah appeared. What a great crush it was! I bet, one could hear sights of disappointment here and there last week, as the freelancers tried to "make it alive".
Hope never dies and the guys at Paypal still assure us of their "great interest to Russian and Ukrainian markets". We'll see.
As for me, I'm back to my "Moneybookers and bank transfer-friendly" agencies, that are flexible and enough to offer more, than one payment method.