| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5] > | Strange email about a "new service" Thread poster: Kate Tomkins
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| On APIs and option to opt out | Aug 4, 2015 |
Sheila Wilson wrote:
ATTENTION ALL TRANSLATORS HERE ON PROZ.COM!
I am absolutely livid at what I've just seen on the TM-Town site. I don't know how to get it to copy to this forum, but I've just found that I'm on the list of translators named on this TM-Town site. A site that I have never used; have no wish to use; do not endorse in any way. And all the names that I'm familiar with from here on ProZ.com are on there along with me. Or maybe it's just those of us with the "P" symbol? I don't know.
I'll be raising this on another forum just as soon as I've calmed down a little.
Hi Sheila,
Thanks for posting this, and thanks, Kevin, for calling my attention to it.
To give you some background, the API's are provided so that potential clients may conveniently search for translators beyond the confines of ProZ.com. (We consider opportunities to meet clients to be one of the core things we offer in the membership suite, so we feel that adding to the stream of potential clients in this way is consistent with serving members.) We don't scrutinize API users very carefully on issues such as rates, business practices, etc., since any API partner could just use ProZ.com, and anyway, we think it is up to members to choose who they work with an under what conditions.
The API's have been available for many years, but it is only recently (this year) that they have begun to be used significantly. Your posting, and the recent increase in activity (at TM-Town, Motaword, etc.), makes me realize that now would be a good time to remind/inform all of our members of the existence of the API's, and the option to opt out -- which is here: http://www.proz.com/?sp=settings_tpx_api (We have the option to opt out entirely now, we will be adding the option to opt out on a partner by partner basis.)
Our apologies for not getting notifications out about this sooner!
Henry
| | | | ..... (X)
Local time: 06:34
| Updated Terms | Aug 4, 2015 |
Hi Kate, Sheila, and TanjaO,
Thank you for all the great feedback in this thread. Your concerns are all reasonable and understandable.
As my intentions with TM-Town are completely opposite to some of the concerns posted, your feedback made it clear to me that I need to do a better job of communicating that.
Thus I have updated the TM-Town Terms of Service (<... See more Hi Kate, Sheila, and TanjaO,
Thank you for all the great feedback in this thread. Your concerns are all reasonable and understandable.
As my intentions with TM-Town are completely opposite to some of the concerns posted, your feedback made it clear to me that I need to do a better job of communicating that.
Thus I have updated the TM-Town Terms of Service (https://www.tm-town.com/terms_of_service) to hopefully address some of your concerns. Obviously there will still be many translators who may not ever be comfortable using a cloud service and that is fine and understandable, but hopefully the news terms will help to clear up some misconceptions. I added the following two items:
1) TM-Town does NOT, and will NOT, learn, train or otherwise use the content of your TMs and glossaries to its own benefit. What TM-Town provides is the opposite: the opportunity for you, the translator, to benefit from your content.
2) While TM-Town makes it possible for translation buyers to meet and order translations from translators registered with TM-Town, TM-Town does not itself offer translation services to clients.
Kevin ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Translators don't cheat... | Aug 4, 2015 |
Siegfried Armbruster wrote:
Interesting enough, the specialist it recommends for "EN-DE Medical" is not specialized in medical at all and is native in Greek. This looks like a real improvement.
Soon after Kevin introduced his innovative service, I signed up, using my daughter's name (yes, Meta), not a translator. I uploaded a (copied EN-ID) dictionary, and there she was, listed on TM-Town with 63k entries. But it doesn't work that way. Even an English-Indonesian translator who uploaded only 6 TUs was listed higher. And you won't find Meta or the Greek lady in the Featured Members on the TM-Town homepage. And both of them won't show up when clients compare their jobs to the translator's resources, simply because they never uploaded TUs.
That encouraged me to sign up using my own name. After all, you can't cheat with TUs, or can you? I happen to translate EU BS, in two language pairs at that, so uploading 2 DGTs would most certainly put me on top of the list of EU translators, possibly of all translators. But it doesn't work that way. There's a limit to what you can translate in 20+ years of translating (in my case), and uploading those DGTs would come pretty close to that limit, for one "specialisation" only. Besides, I think Kevin has an algorithm in place to check suspected cheaters, like people who upload a DGT. So I decided to play it fair. I do play the system, by uploading just enough TUs to be on that Featured Members list, preferably on the last place. And I can continue that policy for quite some time.
But that still isn't the essence of what I think makes TM-Town brilliant. It just mirrors your activity. The brilliant part is when clients match their job and a translator's TUs. It's probably not infallible, but it's the closest thing you can achieve as a client looking for a capable translator. And the client doesn't have to be an agency, it may very well be a direct customer. And even the PMs of good agencies cannot know every specialisation in every language pair (I was actually contacted last week by a PM who wasn't a linguist at all). It's also not necessarily the final stage of the allotment procedure. A client may still require a test translation or references or whathaveyous.
I don't know if TM-T will be a success, I don't know if it will be abused (it will be, but anything can and will be abused, it's the scale that matters), but I'm convinced it can contribute to a better selection procedure.
Cheers,
Hans
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Meta Arkadia wrote:
Translators don't cheat...
I never said that there is any cheating by translators. In my opinion there is a problem with how the software works.
Interesting enough, the specialist it recommends for "EN-DE Medical" is not specialized in medical at all and is native in Greek. This looks like a real improvement.
As an LSP, we do have the task to find the best translator for a given job. The ProZ Profiles and the directory are actually still one of the best methods to do this.
The results created by TM Town are not (yet) convincing.
[Edited at 2015-08-04 06:01 GMT]
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| Did you give it a try? | Aug 4, 2015 |
Siegfried Armbruster wrote:
I never said that there is any cheating by translators.
I never said you said it. I said it.
The results created by TM Town or not (yet) convincing.
Did you try? Did you actually send a source document to have it analysed by TM-Town? I haven't, and I'd be very interested in the results.
Cheers,
Hans
| | | | | 30 years back I started working in a nuclear power plant | Aug 4, 2015 |
- just to find out how they work and to build my own opinion on nuclear power.
Meta Arkadia wrote:
Did you try? Did you actually send a source document to have it analysed by TM-Town? I haven't, and I'd be very interested in the results.
Yes, Hans, I just did. I have enough TMs in my specialties that do not contain any confidential information and I want to understand what it does and how it works.
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Siegfried Armbruster wrote:
I have enough TMs in my specialties that do not contain any confidential information and I want to understand what it does and how it works.
I noticed you've been active there. Thank you for giving it a try.
Did TM-Town recommend another translator than you for the document you uploaded?
Cheers,
Hans
| | | | | uploading translations | Aug 4, 2015 |
I find that most shocking since translations are confidential. I always refuse to send samples; how would those peaole asking for them feel if their work was splashed all over the net or website? They can ask for a test if they do not trust your CV, but not samples. Here is a website where peole just upload units of translations. unprofessional is the word that comes to my mind immediately.
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| Unprofessional | Aug 4, 2015 |
mariealpilles wrote:
...unprofessional is the word that comes to my mind immediately.
Thank you for calling me unprofessional. And I'm glad you're showing of your professionalism by your posting above. I still have lots to learn.
Cheers,
Hans
| | | | ..... (X)
Local time: 06:34
| All uploaded documents are private | Aug 4, 2015 |
Hi mariealpilles,
Thank you for your comment.
mariealpilles wrote:
how would those peaole asking for them feel if their work was splashed all over the net or website
Just to be very clear. All documents uploaded to TM-Town are automatically private and secure. The content of the document is NEVER revealed to anyone or made public. When you upload a document only 3 pieces of data are made public (and there is the option to turn these off):
1) The language pair(s) of the documents
2) The number of translation units or term concepts
3) The fields of expertise you tag the document with
To answer your specific question though, how would I feel if my work was all over the net...it is - here is my GitHub profile. Most of my work is private but on GitHub I have made some code public which you can view. I have released a few open source tools while working on TM-Town including:
1) TM-Town's sentence segmentation engine
2) A word count analysis tool
3) I also maintain a list of open source natural language processing tools in Ruby
In my opinion sharing my code on GitHub has been very good for me and my career and has allowed me to start to make a name for myself in the Ruby community as well as present at a Ruby meetup.
mariealpilles wrote:
I find that most shocking since translations are confidential. I always refuse to send samples
I can understand your feelings here. I think a sample doesn't have to be necessarily something you have done for a client. For example a sample could be something you translate that is public (i.e. a Wikipedia page in your field of expertise). In the future I would potentially like to add this functionality into TM-Town - give translators the option to translate a small public sample in their field of expertise instead of uploading a document.
-------
Separately, Hans asked me about uploading a source document and having it analyzed to find the best translator and I wanted to share my response with everyone.
When a customer purchases translation on TM-Town the terminology of the source document will be analyzed and compared with the work that translators have loaded into the system to find the best match (based on an analysis of the terminology used). The actual results of the analysis are not shared, except for the matching translators and a similarity score. These results might vary from the results of the TM-Town directory as the directory fields are based on the fields that translator have self tagged their documents with, while the analysis of the terminology provides more targeted results.
Hans was wondering if this type of search feature is public and the answer is: not currently. I am working on potentially making this type of search tool public in the future, but it is not public yet.
Kevin
| | | | | It is easy to call others unprofessional | Aug 4, 2015 |
mariealpilles wrote:
I find that most shocking since translations are confidential. ... Here is a website where peole just upload units of translations. unprofessional is the word that comes to my mind immediately.
I think I said very clearly "I have enough TMs in my specialties that do not contain any confidential information". Is it so difficult to understand "do not contain any confidential information".
What gives you the right to call this "unprofessional"?
[Edited at 2015-08-04 09:12 GMT]
| | | | | Seems to be standard technology | Aug 4, 2015 |
Meta Arkadia wrote:
Did TM-Town recommend another translator than you for the document you uploaded?
I actually found the feature that will allow me (as a translation buyer) to upload a document to be analysed, but you have to pay to test it. Up to now, all I used were selectors for language pair and specialty. This will produce a list of candidates.
As a translator, you select your specialties and you define the specialties that match your uploaded TMs. The number of segments in the TMs seem to be used to define your ranking in your language pair and specialty, just like the KudoZ points are used by ProZ.
[Edited at 2015-08-04 11:43 GMT]
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Kate Tomkins
Local time: 21:34
Member (2012)
German to English
TOPIC STARTER | This is what confuses me the most | Aug 4, 2015 |
mariealpilles wrote:
I find that most shocking since translations are confidential. I always refuse to send samples; how would those peaole asking for them feel if their work was splashed all over the net or website? They can ask for a test if they do not trust your CV, but not samples. Here is a website where peole just upload units of translations. unprofessional is the word that comes to my mind immediately.
I have signed NDAs with most of my clients. Surely most translators do this? I would not feel comfortable uploading my past work (apart from a few website translations which are freely accessible on the internet anyway) - particularly because the majority of it is legal and/or financial.
Even if no one else can see the TMs, internet security leaks are common and I am sure SOME people will have access to them, even if they are not public. At the very least, I would want to check that my clients are OK with it, but on the other hand, I expect they are busy and would like the idea even less than me ...
| | | | Sheila Wilson 
Spain
Local time: 21:34
Member (2007)
English
+ ...
| Some requests | Aug 4, 2015 |
Henry Dotterer wrote:
We don't scrutinize API users very carefully on issues such as rates, business practices, etc., since any API partner could just use ProZ.com, and anyway, we think it is up to members to choose who they work with an under what conditions.
That's clear, Henry, from the fact that this is not the first site user that has, in my mind at least, abused the system. The very fact that we choose to work with clients of our own choosing is what is being undermined here. It appears that it has been decided for me, without my knowledge, that I am somehow available for work through TM-Town. I am not.
The API's have been available for many years, but it is only recently (this year) that they have begun to be used significantly. Your posting, and the recent increase in activity (at TM-Town, Motaword, etc.), makes me realize that now would be a good time to remind/inform all of our members of the existence of the API's, and the option to opt out -- which is here: http://www.proz.com/?sp=settings_tpx_api (We have the option to opt out entirely now, we will be adding the option to opt out on a partner by partner basis.)
I think that an opt-out facility is just one thing that's necessary.
1) I feel it's important for you, ProZ.com, to vet your API partners carefully both before and during the partnership;
2) I feel we should be informed immediately of each APÏ partner that's taken on;
3) I feel that there should be vastly more transparency.
I signed up to ProZ.com. I didn't sign up to every business venture that ProZ.com decides to get into bed with.
| | | | Sheila Wilson
Spain
Local time: 21:34
Member (2007)
English
+ ...
| Doesn't that surprise you, Siegfried? | Aug 4, 2015 |
Siegfried Armbruster wrote:
I actually found the feature that will allow me (as a translation buyer) to upload a document to be analysed, but you have to pay to test it.
They don't seem over-anxious to tempt clients to actually order anything, do they? It's difficult to even find the part of the site where buyers are addressed. Hardly welcoming. How is TM-Town going to provide us with all these promised job opportunities if it doesn't welcome potential clients? On the other hand, the site welcomes those of us with TMs with open arms.
The FAQs mention nothing about actually working with clients. Nothing about the actual process of contact between translator and client, negotiations, delivery etc. Zilch! It seems that clients and their jobs occupy a very secondary role. The main aim of the site is clearly to collect those TMs and glossaries. But why?
Does the bio that Kevin Dias, TM-Town's owner, displays on the site give us any insight into the site's priorities? This is an extract:
Before developing TM-Town I built an online CAT Tool called transdraft
This couldn't be a ruse to populate your own TM so you can add MT to your very own CAT tool, could it, Kevin?
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