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Thread poster: Rolf Sunde
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Rolf Sunde 
Norway
Local time: 21:02
Member (2021)
English to Norwegian
SITE LOCALIZER
[Subject edited by staff or moderator 2022-10-20 08:50 GMT]
| | | | finnword1
United States
Local time: 15:02
English to Finnish
+ ...
| Kudos is spelled with an s | Sep 27, 2022 |
It's a Greek word anyway. As translators, we should be able to come up with an English word.
| | | | | Earning KudoZ points is not the only way to be found by clients | Sep 27, 2022 |
Hi Rolf!
Your language pair is quite rare -> I think, there are not so many translators working with it -> You have very good chances to be found by clients, not only because of KudoZ points.
If you add more keywords (related to services you provide) to your profile, clients find you more easily.
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Look like for many clients the price is much more important. To me hundreds of kudoz tell that probably these people spend too much time giving free advice, which means they are not too overloaded with jobs.
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Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 21:02
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
I agree that it would have been nice if number of WWAs and number of referrals were taken into account. On the other hand, WWAs don't say anything about how good you translate. It only says something about how professional you are. The point of using KudoZ for the sort order is that translators with more KudoZ points have "proven" that they know something about that particular language.
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I’m not sure Kudoz carries a lot of weight when a client chooses a translator. Suffice to see how many no-points translators have posted positive LWAs…
| | | | | KudoZ best I think | Sep 27, 2022 |
Basing it on the number of WWAs would simply reward translators who work with lots and lots of different clients. Lots of WWAs could actually be an indicator of a translator not being very good, as they don't get repeat custom.
So I think KudoZ is a better measure, but it should then be based on the past year's points, not all-time points. Nobody could ever get close to some of the old-timers in my pairs from back when KudoZ was popular.
Of course, KudoZ is flawed too, ... See more Basing it on the number of WWAs would simply reward translators who work with lots and lots of different clients. Lots of WWAs could actually be an indicator of a translator not being very good, as they don't get repeat custom.
So I think KudoZ is a better measure, but it should then be based on the past year's points, not all-time points. Nobody could ever get close to some of the old-timers in my pairs from back when KudoZ was popular.
Of course, KudoZ is flawed too, as it rewards scatter-gun answerers who just fire out a guess at everything and sometimes get lucky. So ideally KudoZ score should be weighted by average points per answer.
[Edited at 2022-09-27 08:15 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 21:02
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Teresa Borges wrote:
I’m not sure KudoZ carries a lot of weight when a client chooses a translator.
Yes, but the client first has to find the translator. And Rolf is #5 on page 2 of the directory listing, with no real prospect of raising his position. To get him to page 1, he needs to hope for sufficient KudoZ questions and good fortune (since he is competing with 50 other translators) to earn 10 extra points.
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| Good Fortune? Perhaps | Sep 27, 2022 |
Samuel Murray wrote:
And Rolf is #5 on page 2 of the directory listing, with no real prospect of raising his position. To get him to page 1, he needs to hope for sufficient KudoZ questions and good fortune (since he is competing with 50 other translators) to earn 10 extra points.
I'm in the middle of the 3rd page. I am one of 753 members and 41570 (!) non-members who work in the English -> Russian language pair (very common and popular). However, I am visible to clients, they find me - I regularly receive job offers. All my clients found me on ProZ and most of them became my long-term customers.
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By your reasoning, I should get much more job offers than I do as I have just looked and I am today the first European Portuguese translator in the Directory…
| | | | expressisverbis
Portugal
Local time: 20:02
Member (2015)
English to Portuguese
+ ...
| KudoS and KudoZ | Sep 27, 2022 |
finnword1 wrote:
It's a Greek word anyway. As translators, we should be able to come up with an English word.
I am not a native English speaker, as you can see, but I know that in the origin of the word 'kudos', phonetics plays its part.
It is pronounced in American English with a final Z while in British English the final S is pronounced as it is (S).
I believe the same goes for Proz and Pros. Perhaps this was made on purpose for marketing purposes or to sound more creative to our translators' ears.
Please correct me (English speakers) in case I am wrong.
The Greek word is a singular noun, 'kydos', that I would translate into my native language as "louros".
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 21:02
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
To me Kudoz is nothing more than letting other people doing the dirty work for you. If it's impossible to find any reference at all on the internet about a specific term, than it is highly unlikely that another translator can really help you out, since he or she ... can't give you any references about his or her translation proposal, so you will still have to tell your customer that you are uncertain about a certain term. And if he or she can, then you haven't done your job properly.
... See more To me Kudoz is nothing more than letting other people doing the dirty work for you. If it's impossible to find any reference at all on the internet about a specific term, than it is highly unlikely that another translator can really help you out, since he or she ... can't give you any references about his or her translation proposal, so you will still have to tell your customer that you are uncertain about a certain term. And if he or she can, then you haven't done your job properly.
To me this whole Kudoz ranking system is absurd and highly unimportant. Why should clients have to 'find' you if you can find them? I'm regularly contacted by agencies, but until now I have always ignored their messages. Sometimes because their request didn't interest me for various reasons, but always because I was, you know, busy translating. And if I wouldn't have any work, a highly theoretical situation until today, I can imagine I would be busy searching for (good) clients myself.
The absurdity of the Kudoz system fully dawned on me when a fellow translator hinted on this platform a while ago that I could not be an overly good translator because I have only 1 WWA and hardly any Kudoz points. Oh boy. Astounding how people rely on this platform like it is the translation market itself. ▲ Collapse
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Mr. Satan (X)
English to Indonesian
Samuel Murray wrote:
I agree that it would have been nice if number of WWAs and number of referrals were taken into account. On the other hand, WWAs don't say anything about how good you translate. It only says something about how professional you are.
Why must it be like that, though? The WWA can certainly factor in the quality of translation from a language professional. In fact, I’ve seen several outsourcers accounted this as a criterion when giving their feedback. I would argue that the average WWA score from the star rating is a much more desirable ranking system than the KudoZ points. Let me demonstrate.
Case #1: The Bad Translator
I’m a bad translator who couldn’t keep my client base, and I had to keep finding new ones. Let’s say I’ve managed to get 20 from ProZ so far. For my poor performance, it was only fair for the outsourcers to gave me a sea of 1s and 2s, with some occasional 3s and one 5. Then, my average WWA score would be:
1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 3 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 2 + 5 + 3 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 = 39/20 = 1.95
Case #2: The Good Translator
I’m a good translator, and so I got 2 repeat customers from ProZ. I don’t need more clients, as these 2 already keep me busy enough. They were very satisfied with the quality of my translation, and both of them gave me 5s. Then, my average WWA score would be:
5 + 5 = 10/2 = 5.00
This seems fair to me. Why aren’t we doing it?
Lieven Malaise wrote:
To me Kudoz is nothing more than letting other people doing the dirty work for you. If it's impossible to find any reference at all on the internet about a specific term, than it is highly unlikely that another translator can really help you out, since he or she ... can't give you any references about his or her translation proposal, so you will still have to tell your customer that you are uncertain about a certain term. And if he or she can, then you haven't done your job properly.
I’d rather keep a positive thought that perhaps my colleagues know something I don’t. I’m not an oracle, after all. There’s no way I could possibly know everything about anything. And the internet is not as reliable as people make it out to be, either.
[Edited at 2022-09-29 15:13 GMT]
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 21:02
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Mr. Satan wrote:
I’d rather keep a positive thought that perhaps my colleagues know something I don’t.
But you can't know that without references. It's nice to read something like "I have been working for over 20 years in the field and I know that you should translate term X as translation Y", but objectively that's of no use to you if you can't find any confirmation of it.
Mr. Satan wrote:
And the internet is not as reliable as people make it out to be, either.
The internet is a massive terminology treasure, hidden under a zillion booby traps. A good translator knows how to avoid them and get to the treasure.
One of the booby traps, by the way, is googling a term, finding a link to a proz kudoz question and assuming it's a correct answer.
[Edited at 2022-09-30 05:26 GMT]
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 21:02
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Mr. Satan wrote:
I would argue that the average WWA score from the star rating is a much more desirable ranking system than the KudoZ points. Let me demonstrate.
I'm not familiar with the WWA system that you're talking about. AFAIK, only outsourcers can get a WWA ranking from 1 to 5. Translators can only get a non-numbered WWA entry, i.e. without any rankings. This means essentially that when a translator gets a WWA, it is worth 4 or 5 points, always. Clients who want to give translators a poor review can't use the WWA system to do it.
So, one translator might have 5 WWAs and another translator might have 10 WWAs, but all we can deduce from that is the the second translator worked for more clients who are willing to give WWAs and that the second translator may have impressed more agencies with their professionalism than the first one.
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