Excerpts from Patenttranslator's blog. Might be a bit too blunt, but has a few points.
TOP SEVEN WORST WAYS TO LOOK FOR WORK AS A TRANSLATOR
1. Contacting agencies listed in the List of Top 100 Translation Agencies prepared by the Common Sense Advisory. How do you think these agencies got so big and their owners so rich? By paying translators good money and fast? Or by paying the people who do the actual work as little as possible, they way KFC, McDonalds and Burger King have been doing it for decades? (...)
3. Looking for work on “Portals for Translators” such as Proz, GoTranslators, TranslatorsCafe, etc. (a new one pops up online every few months). When you have hordes of underemployed translators, some of them living in third world countries, competing on these “portals” among each other who will offer the lowest bid for 1 lousy job, what do you think the result will be?
4. Accepting work from translation agencies in India or China.
5. Accepting work from translation agencies that are based in poor countries on any continent (...) especially if they prominently feature on their website the Manhattan skyline (...) with multiple addresses in respective countries.
The address is a mail box, and the purpose of the pretty pictures is to convince potential customers that the agency is a respected company that is based in a major Western city... The translators, however, will be obviously paid the equivalent of the minimum wage paid where the agency is in fact located.
6. Accepting work from translation agencies who are looking for “post-editors” of machine translation rather than for translators. This new occupation of “post-editor” was created in the first place to save money that would be otherwise paid to real translators for real translations.
7. Soliciting work by sending thousands of junk e-mails to lists of translation agencies compiled by people who sell useless lists on CDs for hundreds of Euros to newbie translators. Every agency receives dozens or hundreds of resumes from these poor people every day.
Since these CDs also include an idiotic cover letter that all of these would-be translators simply copy and include with their resume ... these offensive e-mails will be promptly deleted within a split second.
