How to Get Paid for Translation Work

You found your translation customer, you got your translation job, you work hard, but then when it comes time to get paid you get the silent treatment from your new customer. Or perhaps you worked for them for a longer period of time, always getting smaller jobs, but you got the silent treatment after you completed a rather large project.

This is the dread of every translator and what you too will experience if you are not careful. But there are ways you can avoid this.

First of all you should always check the reputation of a new translation customer before accepting any work from them. The best place to check this is on Proz.com's BlueBoard. Without a membership you can see the company's overall score, but not the comments submitted by other translators. If you have no membership and want to see the comments from other translators, you can invest 20$ into your "wallet", where each $1 investment entitles you to permanent access to the comments concerning one customer. Translatorscafe.com is another good site, although also restricted to non-members, and translationpayments.com is fully and freely accessible.

If you place your hopes on a contract it will only work if properly formulated and applicable in the country where the customer is registered. Since the translation industry has become so globalised this can be a rare luxury. And even if you do write up a solid contract with a customer in its own country, if they do not want to pay you will probably find it very difficult to exact payment from them. You will need to prove that your translation was not faulty, that they assigned you the work, there will be legal fees, and generally the entire headache might not be worth it. Not to mention that there are some sharks out there who have a very fancy looking website but who are in the habit of transferring it to a new name and changing the company name in the header every time they decide to press the reset button and run away from those they owe payment to.

If you do get stuck in the trap, the best response is to remain polite but keep calling them, plead them, and perhaps make up some story how you have mouths to feed, etc. Appealing to their sympathy should generally yield better results than hostile threats over the phone. If the first approach fails, then you can resort to the latter.

If you do get burned make sure to report it on all the translation payment reputation forums to protect others and make it more difficult for such companies to operate.

If you are fortunate to work for a reliable translation company and it looks like payment is in the bag, there are many ways you can receive the payment. One obvious one is by bank transfer, but the fees for such payment can be rather high - not only for the sender but also for you, the recipient. Furthermore, sometimes an intermediary bank is required, and although they are not supposed to charge anything, often they do.

Very common in the translation industry now is to get paid by PayPal.com or Moneybookers.com. These fees are generally low (unless the payment is made from different continents) and the transfer is immediate. It is easy to set up these online accounts and they can be hooked up to your bank account and/or you can order a credit card and withdraw your money through any bank machine. But be aware that these are not actual banks, with a physical headquarters you can come complain to, so make sure to remember your password and secret security questions. If you forget the latter you may have a problem accessing your account. With PayPal you can also arrange for payment by credit card. The system designs a fancy "Buy Now" button for you and your customer is directed from your website to PayPal's secure online payment system - at no cost to you!

These are the most common forms of payment, but such services are not necessarily available in all countries. In which case you might try WesternUnion, although Unistream charges significantly lower fees - so check them out first. But most customers will not want to pay by these means. You will probably need to offer an exotic language combination for them to accept such forms of payment.

Further details:
Getting paid for translation work
Email to 16,000 translation companies

Tracking IP Addresses With A Reliable IP Geolocation Database

The number of people showing interests in tracking IP addresses has really has really increased since the past few months. This is expected considering the millions of people who use the internet for one thing or the other. As a matter of fact, over a billion people use the internet for various online ventures; and that is why it is difficult to ignore the benefits of owning a credible IP geolocation database. We all already understand how internet protocol addresses are attached to cities by an ISP; essentially, this is to make the process of identification very easy. However, a lot of mistakes have been made recently by people who lack adequate knowledge on the importance of a reliable database.

However, internet protocol addresses are no longer attached to a particular location these days; and is indeed a big challenge for those who want to want to locate people by internet protocol. For various reasons, a lot of proxies are now being used to make it difficult to locate the exact location of a visitor to a website. This is not only seen as a concern; but a situation that may lead to a lot of confusion when it comes to tracking IP addresses. Accessibility to quality and consistent data is also affected by this development, and the only way out is to own a reliable IP country database.

One issue that must not be compromised when considering an IP city database is reliability. Anyone serious about tracking IP addresses should know that he/she requires more than generalized information. Although a reliable database may not be able to provide some personal information of an internet protocol address; it should at least be able to pin-point the exact location of the address. Any effort not capable of providing adequate information relevant to your search should be treated as inconsequential; and should be discontinued as soon as possible.

Business and profit are inseparable; that is why you need accurate data of people who visit your website always. The importance of this kind of information can be better appreciated from the perspective of meeting the tastes of customers. The customer base will definitely improve when their needs are treated with top-most priority; and this requires owning a quality IP country database. When this is taken care of, you can design your website to meet their needs.

Remarkably, no business can succeed without satisfying the needs of customers; this is one reason tracking IP addresses will benefit you in the long run!

A good site to actually see how accurate IP Geolocation works is at http://www.trackipaddresses.com/. Check out their features and learn more how precise position profiling of online visitors could help businesses and other online ventures. For more information, Visit Track IP Addresses!