Poll: Have you ever contacted the owners of your favorite websites or products to offer your services?
Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
ProZ.com Staff
ProZ.com Staff
SITE STAFF
Jun 14, 2017

This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Have you ever contacted the owners of your favorite websites or products to offer your services?".

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Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida  Identity Verified
Portugal
Local time: 20:39
Member (2007)
English to Portuguese
+ ...
Yes Jun 14, 2017

Once or twice with no success at all!

 
Angus Stewart
Angus Stewart  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 20:39
Member (2011)
French to English
+ ...
No and I wouldn't Jun 14, 2017

Such behaviour is too brazen and self promoting for my liking, so I wouldn't feel comfortable doing so.

 
Christopher Schröder
Christopher Schröder
United Kingdom
Member (2011)
Swedish to English
+ ...
??? Jun 14, 2017

Angus Stewart wrote:

Such behaviour is too brazen and self promoting for my liking, so I wouldn't feel comfortable doing so.


Why is this different from approaching any other prospective customer???

I haven't, mainly because I'm not sure Plentymorenaughtyfish have much of a need for translations from Swedish.


 
Ricki Farn
Ricki Farn
Germany
Local time: 21:39
English to German
Other Jun 14, 2017

I don't like any commercial website or product enough to be passionate about it. And by now I guess I'm so old and jaded that I wouldn't even find any non-commercial offering interesting enough to want to contribute to it.

[Edited at 2017-06-14 09:00 GMT]


 
José Henrique Lamensdorf
José Henrique Lamensdorf  Identity Verified
Brazil
Local time: 17:39
English to Portuguese
+ ...
In memoriam
Yes, and I did it! Jun 14, 2017

It was between my divorce and my current marriage, i.e. I was single, so some time in the 1993-99 period. I had found Matchmaker.com and, at that time, there were no such services online in Brazil, at least to their level of sophistication. I became a user.

Later I contacted them, and we eventually agreed to develop a Brazilian version of it in Portuguese. I had my yearly business trip to New Jersey and California - relative to the HRD programs I had translated and represented in Br
... See more
It was between my divorce and my current marriage, i.e. I was single, so some time in the 1993-99 period. I had found Matchmaker.com and, at that time, there were no such services online in Brazil, at least to their level of sophistication. I became a user.

Later I contacted them, and we eventually agreed to develop a Brazilian version of it in Portuguese. I had my yearly business trip to New Jersey and California - relative to the HRD programs I had translated and represented in Brazil - so that once I extended my trip to their headquarters in Dallas, TX. We signed an agreement, and I translated the entire site. I would be their System Operator for the Brazilian site.

While we were testing the Brazilian site, possibly a couple of weeks before it went live, the whole Matchmaker.com was sold to Lycos, which decided not to open new sites for a while, just keep the ~25 sites they had running while they did some extensive system redesign. I was fully paid for the entire translation, and the story ended right there. I learned that later they were sold again.
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Jina Yeo
Jina Yeo
Local time: 05:39
Member
English to Korean
Good Idea! Jun 14, 2017

I've never thought of this way to getting a new job. But this poll gives me a fresh idea of creating jobs for myself proactively. I think I am going to have a new approach to the websites in the languages that I can translate.

 
Mario Freitas
Mario Freitas  Identity Verified
Brazil
Local time: 17:39
Member (2014)
English to Portuguese
+ ...
No Jun 14, 2017

I don't think that's something a translator should do. Even if you do succeed and get an eventual job (very unlikely), it would be a one-time job with people who are not used to the translation market. This is not really the type of client we're looking for. We want portfolio clients.

 
Catherine De Crignis
Catherine De Crignis  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 21:39
Member (2012)
English to French
+ ...
@ José Jun 14, 2017

José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:

I was fully paid for the entire translation, and the story ended right there.


So I don’t suppose you met your current wife through this website you’re telling us about?


NB : No I haven’t and I probably wouldn’t (same reason as Chris!), but perhaps I should consider it...


 
José Henrique Lamensdorf
José Henrique Lamensdorf  Identity Verified
Brazil
Local time: 17:39
English to Portuguese
+ ...
In memoriam
OFF TOPIC - Close to it Jun 14, 2017

Catherine De Crignis wrote:

So I don’t suppose you met your current wife through this website you’re telling us about?


I was on the verge of adding the story to my original post, but left it out.

The whole story is that I only met (I mean, face-to-face) one girlfriend through Matchmaker. Let's call her Sylvia, which is not her real name. We dated for several months in 1998. A bunch of friends and friends-of-friends set up a potluck New Year's Eve party at my present wife's home. At this time Deborah (my wife's real name) and I were just acquaintances. Indeed, she found Sylvia and I such a perfect couple, that she took many pictures of us. Six months later, life had taken its turns, and Deborah and I became the perfect couple ever since; our daughter will be 16 next month.

Some funny things are that Sylvia and I first met online in the US Matchmaker, though we lived about 5 miles apart from each other. Both of us were divorced then, yet we discovered that our respective first marriages had taken place in the very same city, year, month, day, and hour! Sylvia is a MD, we found out that her permanent class partner at Med School, let's call her Pauline (all fake names hereon), had married a classmate of mine in high school. There are more coincidences, but I'll spare the readers.

Someone must have equated the universe to an immense set of gears in motion. Sometimes we can actually notice how some of them mesh together.


 


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Poll: Have you ever contacted the owners of your favorite websites or products to offer your services?






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