I (as a freelance translator of French to English) joined ProZ 25 years ago and after trialling it for myself, took out a membership subscription, which I cancelled in 2024. At the time this was truly a language industry-focussed website and my membership enabled me to secure several successful client connections and what I judge to be a good reputation on the site. The KudoZ facility, despite a few shortcomings, was useful and it encouraged healthy debate about the “best” way to translate complex terms (linguists often disagree of course). Sadly this has all changed now, firstly (and not through any fault of ProZ) because the human freelance translation market has been almost killed off by AI. However, the site has over the past 3 or 4 years become virtually dysfunctional – by allowing advertisements on its job board by extremely dubious actors. Many of these have already been exposed as scammers. Others offer work for “AI training”, often at bottom feeder rates, and some of these require participants to provide material containing personal data, such as multiple emails, images, voice data and even asking for the participation of young children. I and others have alerted ProZ to the potential dangers of such work, but the site staff consistently maintain that ProZ is only a marketplace, whilst also claiming to have a moderation policy to bar advertising that is not truly of interest to language professionals. The reality is that our cries for ProZ to clean up its site and to permanently remove suspicious advertising have been ignored. Added to that, the site has been undergoing “improvements” but these have been rolled out in a completely haphazard fashion, sometimes changing members’ data without their permission and not – as they should be – in a sand box environment. Many of the former site staff have left the company and the CEO no longer appears to care as the site sinks deeper and deeper into the murk. As another commenter on here has put it, ProZ is no longer a safe place for a linguist.
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ProZ.com is home to the world's largest network of freelance translators, and is the number one place for those requiring translation services to connect with translation companies and freelance translators.
