Becoming a translator
To become a freelance translator you have to practice a lot and this is very hard at the beginning, because agencies usually look for experienced translators! This kind of experience cannot be gained through university books: you need intensive work sessions, remain focused for hours not just minutes, learn from customer’s feedback and deal with many other factors that can be summarized by the word “practice”.
However, working from home as a translator leads to isolation! This is the main flaw of this job that many translators complain about: without a real debate with the others, it’s definitely harder to learn and improve, not to mention that there are also less incentives.
The Foreign Friend – which is almost entirely made up of former freelance translators – is well aware of these problems and is committed to helping young blood to practice and promoting collaboration & growth among professional translators.
Here you can find some of our initiatives:
- Collaborative Translation – We firmly believe that competition among professionals damages the end result – on the other hand, collaboration can improve it, that’s why we handle the largest possible number of projects in an online environment (forum, project chat, and shared comments on individual segments): translators, reviewers, PMs, terminologists, customers…all are online and offer help to or ask support from each other. Our goal is to bring out synergies and professionalism!
- Feedback – Customer feedback and reviewers’ suggestions help you to build confidence or to identify areas of improvement
- CAT Basic training – Once translators are past the selection process, they can access the MyTraining area to find a wealth of information on taming a CAT and much more!
- Translation stage – We periodically organize translation stages in-house, so that we can help future professional translators to take the first steps in this career.
If you haven’t joint The Foreign Friend’s team yet, click on the above “Leave your details” button and you will be contacted as soon as new opportunities of collaboration arise. If you have already joint our group and you have advice on how to help your colleagues become (better) translators, we will be glad to take them into account!
A breath of fresh air!
Friendly, professional, organized, knowledgeable, open-minded and more reliable than a swiss watch payments-wise. A prime example of a “perfect customer”.
Brilliant system, supportive team, nice projects, reliable payments…Thank you, and keep up the good work!
Finally an agency offering a fair chance to enter the translation industry to inexperienced translators. Thank you!
You are exactly what the translation industry was waiting for!
Clear instructions, nice PMs, interesting projects, payments always on time and unbelievable helpful platform: you have made my life easier!
Soul has become one of my best (foreign) friend 🙂
I do appreciate the ability to accept assignments, access a pre-set work environment, deliver files, invoice jobs…Everything with just one single click – Thank you TFF!
It is always a real pleasure to work with you – Thank you my Foreign Friend 🙂