When I first worked as a resource manager 3 months ago, I mostly worked on elance.com. At that time, I was very satisfied with elance because the translators on that platform were always eager to bid for my posted jobs and their price seemed very nice.

On the other hand, I was not a fun for proz.com because we got few proposals for the posted jobs and the price was very high, almost more than 2 or 3 times than the quotations on elance.com. Besides, there are too many contents on proz.com, like ads for different CAT tools, KudoZ and forums, etc.

But changes happen when I was looking for translators for African languages. As usual, I posted several jobs for African languages on elance.com, but I got very few biddings this time and from the CV sent by the contractors, I could tell they are not professional at all and they are not the translators we want.

The same situation went on several days and I had to find another way to hire translators. By coincidence, I found a good function on proz.com, searchable directory of freelance translators and interpreters.

Through this function, I found a lot of very professional translators for African languages. The profile for translators in proz.com are in very details. And I could get to know the translators that I am going to work with very well.

From then on, I always contact and hire translators on proz.com instead of elance.com. It is a really great conversion of me. Gradually, I get to know more about proz.com. It is acutally a social networking site for translation.

The site features a virtual community of translators and offers a wide range of resources, registered users are able to broadcast their professional identity as translators on the internet and receive job offers in the mail with the appropriate language combinations.

It also provides discussion forums and online glossaries. Although much of the website requires paid membership in order to be used, and the website receives income from paid advertising, the site has been developed with the help of unpaid volunteers.

One remarkable feature are its terminology questions, asked and answered by users; more than 2 million term translation questions have been answered via the site.

There are also some other websites like proz.com, like TranslatorsCafe.com, Aquarius.net, GoTranslators and Trally, but they have far more less volume of activity and registered users than proz.com.

ProZ.com, the world’s largest translator organisation.