Here I'm going to speak about some apps and websites, etc that I recommend for freelance translators and often for freelancers in general, but mainly for freelance translators. First of all, I would say boomerang. Now Boomerang has been very useful for me for collecting payments Boomerang works with Gmail, and probably with other email hosts as well as well, I use it for Gmail, and that's the only one I know. And the way it works is that when you're writing an email, there's a boomerang option at the bottom, and this option allows you to resend the same email. If for example, you receive no response within two days or a week or whatever time period you want. You can also choose to send the same email multiple times or at various intervals, whether or not they reply to you anyway, in case you want to chase someone who say owes you money, then this makes it a lot easier for you to chase them so you don't always have to remember to email them regularly.

You send an email. And if they don't reply within two days, automatically, your email gets sent to them again. And you can keep repeating this or you can just set it to send the emails once every week or so, constantly. It also allows you to schedule an email for later on. And you may have various reasons for this for me, quite honestly, it just gives me you know, X number of hours to think of something else to add or change in the translation I just worked on. As you can see from this screengrab, you can choose to send a message in an hour and two hours, four hours tomorrow morning and two days for days, two weeks a month, etc, or a specific time.

So I find myself using this option quite often. The next step I recommend is self control. I already mentioned self control earlier, but now we'll go a bit more into detail. self control is for use on a Mac. I'm not sure if it exists for the PC. However, I'm sure there's an equivalent somewhere.

It's free. And you just search for self control and download it and what it does, I apologize This is in Italian. But you can see below that it has a list of websites, these websites are blocked, and they're blocked for the number of hours I specify above. So here it says one hour, I can do it for two hours for a whole day, you know, whatever I want. So basically, if I decide that I'm going to work for the next, say, three, four hours on a particular job or translation, then I'll click self control. And automatically I know I cannot access Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Hootsuite, and you can put in any website or application or program on your computer here, just so you know, you won't waste time on it and you'll actually get to work once again, this is a handy tool to make it as easy as possible to work as hard as possible to get distracted.

And I find myself using it quite a bit so I recommend it and once again, it is free. The next step is again one that I mentioned before and it's called online OCR dotnet. Now Go into this a bit more in detail in the lesson where I talk about OCR or optical character recognition, I think Anyway, once again, this is a website that I use, you do pay for it, but I find that it is very useful. And once again, this is a screenshot that shows that you can upload any document. Just briefly, OCR means and I'm repeating myself from the earlier lesson. But OCR means that you can take a document that doesn't have text but rather has an image or a scanned document of a text or something like that.

So basically something you cannot parse text from, because you can't copy and paste it because it's an image and what it does is it recognizes the text in it and turns it into a text so that you can then use to copy and paste into Word or into your CAD program or whatever it is. And so, as you can see, it's very simple you choose the source language And then you choose the format that you want it to spit it out in the whichever pages you choose, and then you select the file, upload it and click Convert and it converts. The next step I recommend is actually not an app per se, but it's just a recommendation and a couple apps. The idea here is that you always want to back things up. In short, you should always just have a backup a translator, his entire career will depend on his or her computer.

So always use some form of backup. This can mean either an online backup like Dropbox or Box comm etc. Or an external hard drive, an extra computer, or an automatic backup program like backblaze iCloud or Carbonite. Just briefly here, Dropbox most of you have probably heard of this, but this is an online external hard drive basically with a certain number If gigabytes, you get a certain number for free, and then if you pay you get a lot more I don't remember the exact numbers now because now I actually have a paid program that has like 50 gigs or something. But you I think the free version is around two gigs or something along those lines I but I'd have to check in it and it's changing. So whatever I say probably won't be up to date once you hear it.

However, Dropbox comm allows you to copy and paste files and keep backups of them online on the cloud, so you can access them from wherever. Companies like backblaze and Carbonite, automatically backup everything that is in your computer, so you don't even have to think about it. And I actually have both I have Dropbox, and I have backblaze working at the same time. So I'm constantly having everything backed up. And the idea behind backblaze is actually that if say even if you lose your computer, they'll send you everything you need, either online or via USB or on a CD even or number of CDs depending how much you have it And so you can retrieve everything that you have and it's backed up automatically so you don't have to think about it. iCloud for those of you who use a Mac are familiar with iCloud otherwise you probably don't use it I actually I have a Mac but I don't use iCloud because I use these other programs.

So, but it works along the same lines and an external hard drive is having an actual physical hard drive, which again, I have that as well and every now and then I back it up there. I have redundancy upon redundancy because as I mentioned, all my work is on my computer and that means my livelihood as well.