Hi, today we're going to talk about setting up your accounts. And more specifically, we're going to talk about the freelance websites, as opposed to the websites that concentrate purely on translation. So for the freelance websites, I've calculated about an hour maximum per website, you have most of the information already that you need to enter into the website. So it's just a question of, of getting signed up. And you have a couple options for setting up an account on the various freelance websites. Some of them are free, some of them require payment, and some of them are free until you actually want to bid for a job.

And some of them have guaranteed escrow payment and some don't. And some will help you in the case of non payment or something like that, and some won't, and some have decent jobs available and some just don't. So plainly speaking, some are worth it and some aren't. So the main issue at the beginning is you don't know which ones are worth it and which ones aren't. So I suggest taking the time to create profiles for all of them. Any one of them that you come across because why not?

And when When it comes to time to paying for their services, you can take a minute and evaluate each one of them one by one. But at the beginning, you might as well be present in as many of them as possible. So we have to start off with upwork.com upwork.com is a combination of oDesk and Elance. Now, this is very recent. In fact, it's still happening. I think, as of this recording, elance.com still exists, but it's in its last days, it's, it's going to be part of upwork.com soon and everything will be combined.

Which means some of the stuff I say might be a bit out of date or might change since the change is going on very quickly. As of now, however, it combines oDesk and Elance and combines the features of both. So oDesk is already upwork.com. So actually, you cannot access oDesk anymore. Elance you still can but it'll, it will it will have both aspects. Now the main thing about oDesk was that you could track the time spent on each job.

This means that anyone who assigns a job to You can track how much time you're spending working on it. And this is done through random screenshots while you say you're on the clock, it'll take screenshots at random times to show that you actually are working and you're not just surfing Facebook. Another option they have was, it's to take random pictures through through your webcam of you working. This always seemed a bit controlling, I actually never used it I never have had it used with me while working on translations. Another feature that exists and this is from both oDesk and Elance is the placement test. So a placement test will come up once your profile has been built, you'll have the option to take a test, I would not take this test right away.

If you've been building up your profile, it probably hasn't been very hard work but at the same time you have been building up your profile, and it's best to take this placement test when you're fresh. And I think it's worth waiting until the next day or that afternoon or whenever you're fresh. Just To make sure that you have a good placement test. Also, for now, I would only take a test in the language combination you're most interested in. So for example, say French to English, if that's what you concentrate on, just take the test for French to English, you have time to take the other ones at your leisure. And so you might as well give your favorite combination a better chance from the start, you can feel free to add the other tests later on as time goes by.

And don't worry if you don't do well, you don't have to show the score and you can always retake the test after a short wait. Regardless, however, if you're considering signing up for freelance websites, and there's no reason you shouldn't be considering this then upwork.com is definitely the first one you want to go to. At before I would have said either Elance or oDesk I would have been leaning more towards Elance but now upwork.com combines them so definitely set up your profile on that. And whenever you feel fresh, let's say take your placement test. The next freelance website to consider is called freelancer.com. Now this is has also been gaining in popularity, at least it had been now it seems to have stagnated a bit, but it's initially from Australia, and now it's worldwide.

One thing you should keep in mind though, is that freelancer.com does not have its own form of escrow, which Upwork does. This means that there's a chance that once you complete the work, you could send it off to the client, and then never hear from that client again. So here, you're going to have to use a bit more common sense when dealing with clients and be a bit less trusting. Let's say, I should also mention that getting cheated once or twice is pretty much a rite of passage for long term translators. So but you just want to make sure it never happens on a large job, and in fact, just aim to avoid it all together. If you're wondering how to avoid being scammed, I will discuss it in the lesson called getting paid and I will cover it in detail and talk about how best to avoid getting scammed and how best to ensure that you do get paid.

However, I don't mean to scare you freelancer.com does have quite a few jobs there and I in the past had found quite a few jobs. I just stopped using them once. I did not get paid by client there and I already had other things going on through other websites and portals and so I just didn't bother anymore, but I definitely made more money than I lost with freelancer.com. So at the beginning, I would definitely recommend it. I just grouped the other websites in a generic section because they can vary depending on your language and your country of residence. As an example, mock dudas de is a website that you're going to want to sign up for if you translate to or from German.

While tamago.it is the website that we're all Italian translators should probably sign up. The main issue is that besides there being as many websites as there are languages that they often change, so rather than make a list that'll probably be outdated. By the time you hear this. I suggest you perform several searches using Google or Bing or whatever you prefer. For freelance translation in quotes, or find translators in your life. language.

And the reason for typing find translators is that you want to put yourself in the shoes of someone looking for a translator, right. And that's what they are most likely to type in order to find you. So as an example, here, if you're an Italian translator, you would type find translators in Italian, or throw up a title story, which as you can see, when I type it into Google, the first result is toggle it. So that's definitely a website that I will want to sign up for if I deal with a tie into English or English to Italian translations. Now, I mentioned escrow a couple times, and not all of you might know exactly what this means or how it works. So first of all, it's offered by upwork.com, as I mentioned, but it's not offered by most other websites.

So you should be a bit careful. And so what is it exactly? it it's, it makes payments safer. The way it works is that the provider or your client, when they award you Job, they'll deposit the money to be paid into an account into an account that is held by upwork.com, whereby whoever holds it. And this money is then only released to you upon completion of the job. So this ensures that the first of all, that the client actually has the money and is ready to pay you.

And at the same time, it assures them that you won't take the money and run. So it tends to work very well. So right away, you know, they have the money to pay you and they know that you won't get paid until the job is done until they approve it. There are possible issues such as the client refusing to accept your completed job. But if something like that happens, the issue is taken up by Ilana now by Upwork. And which will look into both parties sides.

And so if you do your job, well, it's very hard for the client to cheat, cheat you on your payment. I have to say I've never had that issue happened to me. So I've always found working with escrow to be a lot safer and a lot more secure, especially when you're working with new clients and you're not sure What to expect. And that's it for the freelancer websites and the next lesson will be about translation websites or websites that specialize in translation and not in freelance work in general.