ProZ.com, Inc. Recensioni 59

Extremely untrustworthy with lying outsourcers who aren't professionals but scammers. Proz facilitates scammers by letting them not pay you when they find your work low quality. So outsourcers like Daniel Shamebo take advantage of that. He lies that you're impersonation of sworn translator and rushes you without paying a fee and even paying at all. When you've done the best and made time to work on the project for him(you also have other better paying jobs to work on) he complaints without reason that your translation doesn't match when it's correct and you have checked everything double. So you delivered service and get paid nothing. This is unjust; nothing is paid when nothing is done but when something is done you should at least be paid something. Nowhere in the world you hire someone and not pay that. But at proz.com that's what happens. DONT WORK WITH/DO BUSINESS PROZ.COM; THEY'RE RULES DON'T MAKE ANY SENSE AND WILL YOU WORK TEN PLILUS HOURS FOR NOTHING FOR SCAMMERS WHO TAKE YOUR HARD WORK AND JUST SAY THE QUALITY IS LOW SO TO NOT HAVE TO PAY. MEANWHILE THEY OF COURSE USE EVERY BIT OF YOUR HARD WORK WHICH IS OF "LOW QUALITY" TO THEM.

Excellent platform for freelancers. Staff is always friendly and ready to help. Nothing short of an awesome!

It's hard enough to be a freelance translator, but ProZ takes advantage of you. You can't find a job unless you pay for a membership. There is NO control by the site whatsoever, so the companies trying to hire you are often not offering better than minimum wage. After you paid ProZ to get a job, that's what you get?! Direct applications are the only way to get a job. At least you won't be robbed of your money.

I got a business account there and I got scammed by someone pretending to be a member of the BlueBoard companies in the platform. We submitted 5 projects for them but they suddenly disappeared after the second reminder of the invoice. I sent all evidence to a ProZ team member but they were unresponsive.
I contacted the mother company and they said I was scammed big time. I am not sure how to get my money and the freelancers' money who worked for me on such projects to get their money back.

LAUGHABLY TERRIBLE SITE. Used to at least be helpful to a beginning translator. I have all kinds of complaints about Proz.com. First of all, Proz.com shows tremendous favoritism and defends “bad actors” all over the place. First of all, there are all these fellow members of Proz.com who are rude as can be. Usually older translators like Kim Metzger who are meaner than a snake in the forums to particularly younger translators new to the industry. Kim, for example, really isn’t a translator. He’s more like a troll who spends all day long on the website. There is no doubt whatsoever that you can find even thousands of examples in the forums of him being extremely insulting to fellow translators. If you try to defend yourself, then the owner Henry rushes to his defense and threatens YOU with expulsion. RIDICULOUS. I think there are many people who rarely come by anymore because they tired of all this crap. The moderators are usually the meanest of them all who need reined in themselves!!!
Proz.com also defends bad agencies. If an agency complains about your work and doesn’t pay you in full, you aren’t allowed to leave a negative rating – which is absolutely ridiculous. Many agency owners are COMPLETELY INCOMPETENT and can’t speak English to save their lives! (Ironically, most of the people WHO WORK FOR PROZ.COM seem to speak very poor English themselves.) Why aren’t you just allowed to give your opinion (truthfully, of course) and allow the agency to respond if it wants to? Why all the censorship and brow-beating?
Many of their rules are completely nonsensical and enforced even more nonsensically with lots of favoritism. For example, non-paying agencies are supposed to be banned after two negative entries. But some get very quickly banned even if their numbers are overall quite good, but then others have negative entry after negative entry after negative entry, but they haven’t been banned and are still even allowed to post jobs. ?????
THE JOB BOARD IS COMPETELY WORTHLESS. I do specialized types of translations and used to get on average probably one job a week from the Job Board. These days, I average probably one job EVERY TWO YEARS. The Job Board has become the haven for sleazy agencies looking to scam translators or to get people to work for one-tenth of what any self-respecting translator from the West would work for.
They also don’t update the Blue Board directory of agencies very much at all. Many links lead to empty pages or you get a notification from Avast not to proceed because it’s a risky likely scammer’s site.
I don’t even bother to research my translations via the Kudoz term search. The searches seem to produce very bad results. Again, they are rarely updated. I have received notifications that entries involving myself were updated FIVE OR TEN YEARS LATER – well, I guess better late than never.
DON’T WASTE YOUR MONEY.

I am a freelance translators and have enriched my clientele by means of proz.com. I think that some of the other reviews are misleading. If someone is electrocuted due to one's negligence, it is not the fault of the electricity.

Despite its user base mainly made up of freelance translators, the site exploits this base in its bid for income, and arguably also makes the job market worse for them, by contributing to downward-sticky prices for established, professional translators in what is a race to the bottom.

Don't be fooled -- they are on the side of outsourcers with paid accounts. Support tickets raised for outsourcers who have rejected your Blue Board WWA rating with lies (and substantiated with evidence to the contrary) will be closed with no action taken.

In other words, the one thing that ProZ is possibly useful for these days -- the Blue Board -- has been grossly compromised. Won't name names here, but ask around. There are smaller, paid rating boards that don't ask for very much, which are much better and ethically managed, and which provide far more reliable insight into the trustworthiness of a potential business partner.

They show lots of racism and discrimination towards members from 3rd world countries, muslims, and members paying less annual fees and they recruit lots scammers...

Also they have very strange rules, that work just fine for unreliable clients or scammers.

Recently we faced non payment issues with few companies we met through proz, we still weren't allowed to report the matter on the blueboard record, and proz moderators are always taking side with those with better membership or from the same nationality, race or religion... They do not treat freelancers in the same manner.

Very cheap customer service. Not trustworthy.

Thank you

They help scammers and they only care about who pays them more, they are very racist. They do not provide good support.

I am a paying member and I do not receive offers by e-mail, having to look each time to see if there is any new work.

I've tried using Proz.com to find a translator. The website is horrendous, borderline unusable. Google 'User Experience Design'! It feels like you launched the website in 1999 then mindlessly added bits and pieces of functionality to it, then lost the blueprints half way through.

This might be a good website for a translator to start out with. It has some good free tools and resources but the jobs will go to the lowest offers and these can sometimes be very low, and expect there to be some scammers - clients and translators. There are some good guides and articles for the beginner. The forums\message boards appear to be managed by a small group of translators. Most discussions are full of sexual content and innuendo, and newcomers are bullied or attacked with racist jokes. "Merv the perv" and a few of the other administrators, (seemingly middle-aged men) seem to get their kicks out of writing seedy content. I'm not sure how this can be allowed on what is supposed to a website for professional translators. Join for the free resources and to get some experience.

They only seem to be interested in one thing - to get your membership fee. Since I do not pay others for my own hopes I never paid. Otherwise it is just another bidding site. I only went there because someone wanted my ProZ profile and I made it but since then I never heard from that someone again. Better keep that money for yourself.
And, yes, anyone can claim to be a translator there. Serious agencies give you a test. You may find out that your fields of expertise do not match their requirements (there is no such thing as a universal translator) and usually it is not so easy to start with an agency even if you pass the test but at least you can expect some result. And it does not cost anything, maybe except the price of printing out a paper contract and sending it to the agency. But not a membership fee for being on their list.

I found that a lot of scammers contacted me from ProZ and I got more trouble from them than help. Another thing I found to be a turn off is that when other members found I was talking a certain language, they contacted me, making nice with me over the phone, finding out how much I charge, what are my clients, only to find out that they were doing that to find out what kind of competition I am for "them". When I would contact them to ask advice, or to just say hi, they ghosted me.
Overall, ProZ lured me in(joining a facebook group required a ProZ membership), but once I was in, I didn't gain anything out of it, except I paid them money, or except "a taking" on their part happened. There was no community- but just folks trying to find out about you, what you do so they can discredit you on some level.

I disagree with the negative comments posted here: I've now been working as a freelance translator for 8 years, and that would never have happened without ProZ.
ProZ offers a great meeting space for freelancers and outsourcers/translation agencies. But that's what ProZ is: a meeting platform. Translation jobs are not magically going to land in your inbox simply because you registered on the platform. As a freelancer, you need to put the work in: build a solid profile, with translation samples to showcase your skills, do a few pro bono jobs and then request feedback to have something to show to potential paying clients, customise your application for each job to show you are the right translator for this specific project, instead of sending the same template to every outsourcer, etc.... And yes, paying members get a lot more benefits and work opportunities, but ProZ is not a charity, they need income to provide their platform to you! So if you are not ready to do all this, then your paying membership will be a waste of money, but if you are, the return on investment is well worth it.
And of course, ProZ can't guarantee that the outsourcer will pay you on time, or that the translator you hire is qualified or reliable, but they have feedback systems in place for both, and they flag up outsourcers that have been consistenly reported for non-payment, so I really think they're doing what is reasonnably possible here.
My one strong criticism would be the way translators are ranked in search results: the rankings are mainly based on the level of participation to their terminology Q&A page for translators (called KudoZ), which is not fair, or representative of the translator's skills/experience.
But, if you're a real, talented translator (not someone who think they can translate because they are vaguely bilingual), and if you have a bit of common sense and business sense, ProZ is a great place to start.

Terrible support
It's an OK site for being contacted by agencies once you've been a member for a few years, but they go out of their way to support dishonest agencies and not their paying customers.

I have now been reached 3 different times by 3 different people/3 different emails all with the same pretense of wanting to hire me for an English to Spanish translation, always using the same document and with the same scheme. The first time I had my doubts but followed through with the back and forth communication until I received a check from them, delivered by UPS. They attempted to pay me over $4K “in advance”, I called the bank the check came from and they confirmed the account had been closed and the check was fraudulent.

Anna Verbuk has been translating from English to Russian in support of MAPS: the Marine Arctic Peace Sanctuary being established as quickly as possible. Her work has been exemplary, and we are grateful to have found her!

Unethical service!
As a translation agency we have been targeted by a group of translator who used Google to translate a large assignment for us. We ended up paying a large sum (over 400.000 USD) in damages to the client and did not pay for the translation these people made.
They used Proz to taget us. We provided proof to Proz in form of documentation from our lawyer and Proz still keeps the negative remarks about us on the site.
We consider Proz to be a place were you find amateur translators, the real ones you find among those listed but the different organisation that organises translator like ATA etc. The management of Proz lacks every form for decency, are unethical and this is clearly why Proz is going down the drain.