Hello fellow translators. So today I want to talk about a question that I received on my course that has to do with kudos points. And basically the question asked, how many kudos points should you have in order to be recognized in order to be found, and you know, chosen in order to pop up in a search for translators. And so I wanted to cover this quickly. And in this video and from scratch, just in case you don't know what kudos points are, because they are actually very important, probably a lot more important than you think when applying for jobs. And I'm going to show you why.

First of all, this deals with proz.com. As I've mentioned before, many times proz.com is the main website for translators, probably a closed our common translators cafe, I'd say are the main websites for translators. I do recommend joining pros comm you do have to pay, but I think it's worth it. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but that's just my opinion. Anyway, you can also join without paying you just can't apply for jobs, but I think actually you can do everything that I'm going to Talk about here without paying. So let's go through this because I think everyone should have a profile proz.com and I'm going to show you why kudos points are so important.

Kudos point. Well, first of all, I should probably cover what kudos points are. Here is how kudos works. It's under terminology. So basically, if you go under, say term search, you enter a term or phrase, I'm gonna, I don't know, axe to grind, and let's see what pops up an axe to grind. You have it here in Spanish.

You have it in Hungarian. You have it in German and all these things. So what happens here is if we click on let's see, that's the grind. Yeah, so basically what happened is someone wrote here axe to grind and was asking for the translation. And because you know it like with these terms, Very often they can be different depending on the situation a bit depending on the formality depending on etc, etc, etc. So anyway, this person asked the English term or phrase an axe to grind.

And what that does is it rather than African sound okay the Spanish it's not my language but basically it shows the thing in English about a company and it says with an axe to grind so in this situation they're asking how should I translate an axe to grind boba? And here a couple people responded and they said that and then they gave the explanation as to why someone else said they agree and so they said thank you someone else wrote this and with the explanation why, and then they wrote thank you and then someone else wrote this and then with the explanation why, now, a when you do this, you get these points. This person, and Okay, actually, let's see, I just want to make sure I get this right because wherever for kudos points were awarded for this answer. And the way you get the answer is that whoever asked the question then decides that that's the right one.

And that's the one they're going to choose. And so they decided when interest besotted was, was the one that they chose, and so that means they get four kudos points. I don't think these other people get any points even though this one got someone to agree. So they got a plus one. You only get the points if the person asking the question agrees that that's what they needed. And, and so then they give you the points.

Anyway, that's the way kudos points works. It's basically when you go answer questions that people might have about a certain expression or something along those lines. And, and, you know, it'll always be like either a new term or a different term or using a different context, and you help them out and then you get kudos points. That's the way you Get them. Okay. Now, why would you do this?

Well, first of all, a lot of people do it. I mean, you know, and I did it as well just because it's interesting. It keeps you in practice and and it really helps out but also gives you these kudos points. If you give the right answer, then you get kudos points. I won't go through how you get three and four. That depends on how on how sure you are of your answer and stuff like that.

But anyway, he got these kudos points. So what do you do with these kudos points. These are actually very important. And I want to show you why. Say, now forget all this and say I'm an agency and I'm looking for a good translator. Let's go.

So what I'm gonna do is go here under translators and interpreters, I could just post the job and find a translator that way, but actually, I more I do this more often. And it really depends on what you're trying to search for if you if you're desperate for a job or if you're looking for translators. Now I do this even if I have a job because that way I can control who I you know, who sees my post. So let's choose yet something very Common Arabic to English translation. And so what I'm going to do now is I'm searching for an Arabic to English translator, right? So I click search and I get these people here.

Now how are they sorted? They're sorted by kudos points. And because, you know, I don't know I actually disagree with pros, I think they should be sorted more on how many reviews and, and ratings they get. But that's the way it is. They're sorted and kudos points. So this person who has 2654, their parents is going to show up first, and then these people show up later because they have as you can see, fewer and fewer kudos points, although these are still quite a few.

Now. What I recommend is being able to have enough kudos points so that you can pop up on this first page because then what happens is a lot of people will pick In fact, they might just click on this And then email these 25 people and and then see who emails back, you know and say I have this job available are you available what your price be and then they see who gets back. Unfortunately, all these people on these other pages won't get this message only these first 25 people will. So if you can show up on the first page that's best. Now you might think, okay, you know, how am I going to get this number of kudos points, you know, there's no way even 252 that's answering so many questions. And that's true.

And the solution to that is, frankly, if we go back to here, usually what people do actually, so they put in all this at least usually what I do is if I have a translation, I might then specify, like, say it's marketing, I want to translate a marketing pamphlet. Then I specify I want a marketing translator because I don't want medical or legal or anything like that. I want a marketing translator. So what happens now I have the same thing. And it's sorted by kudos points, but if you see now there's only eight in the field and it's sorted. by how many they have in the field, not by the pair, the pair is the language pair.

But the number in the field is how it's sorted. And suddenly it's a lot more attainable. Remember that one question got a kudos points? Well, here we have eight in the field. That's two questions, you know, you answer three questions correctly, then you'll be at the top of this list. So that's why you shouldn't despair.

Obviously, it'll depend on on the language combination and on the specialty and how popular they are. Like if I take something else I don't like Acadian. I, you know, for according to English, let's do it. Any because I, I'm gonna imagine they're not too many Acadian English translators. In fact, there's one, this person has zero in their pair, they don't need to worry about getting kudos points. Because if anyone needs an Acadian trance translation, this is your only choice, right?

And so that's why it really depends on your language combination and then on the specialty that you're going to choose after that. So just keep this in Mind I would say a good exercise will be to go to your language combination with your specialization and see how many kudos points people have. And that'll give you a good idea of how many kudos points you should get. And then and so these are the top specializations, but people can get a bit more in detail here. So play around with it a bit and see where you should concentrate. Because, you know, maybe you concentrate, maybe now you're concentrating on marketing, but there are too many people there.

But, you know, maybe you could be concentrating on linguistics, and then you pop up higher on the list, or maybe you should at least answer a couple of questions in linguistics so you do pop up high on that list. And that way you can see because once Oh no, I'm instilling Acadian so yeah, there's nothing there anyway. I would just play around with it anyway. And see what you can do because once again, Pros for some reason organizes their translators by kudos points. So kudos points in the being very important for when people are looking for you to rectly and when people are searching for you directly. So anyway, that's pretty much it.

I just wanted to bring this up because I thought it was an interesting point. And kudos points are interesting and they're important and I realized I hadn't really covered them much in depth before, so I thought it would be a good thing to do. Hopefully you found this useful, please feel free to leave a thumbs up if you do and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't yet. Don't forget, you can find a link to my course right in the description below. That's the cheapest place to find it. And otherwise, I'll see in the next video.

Okay, thanks. Bye.