The more languages you know the more times you are…

The key to efficient promotion of an emerging startup is letting as many people as possible know about it. But how can people know about your project if you tell only IT-specialists about it?

We have not discovered America when we have launched PR campaign where we interview famous people and tell their stories on our blog. Nevertheless, the first thing most of startupers do is promoting their project for IT area.

Your idea is called for solving different people’s issues, so it means that it should be promoted for ordinary potential customers. That is why it is necessary to let not only your colleagues know about your startup usefulness, but also as wider audience as possible. This is obvious that if future users do not care about those details and principles, which can interest programmers and investors, then it is required to feel the right topic and your own way of presentation. What to write about and what kind of audience for? It definitely depends on your project idea and the issue it is going to solve.

Recently, we told about our decision to tell people about our PR campaign with famous people. We have felt our own topic and decided to provide readers with interviews with interesting people. Previous interviews with Stereolizza and Zhanna Ona occurred to be attractive for readers and even exceeded all our hopes. So 2Polyglot continues communicating with celebrities.

This time Russian actress Marina Dubkova having a goal to reach Hollywood, told her story about freelance in profession. Originally from Ukraine, Marina Dubkova possesses 5 languages in total: Ukrainian, Russian, English, Italian and Polish. She improves herself all the time and continues learning languages. It helps her to stay confident and purposeful for conquering foreign scene.

Read the article “Marina Dubkova: As Many Languages You Know, As Many Times You Are an Artist”.

How much money do translators earn

 The international linguistic freelance platform 2Polyglot analyzed global market of translation services and defined average translators’ income amount in different countries.

Days are passing, technologies are being improved, but despite of scientists’ forecasts, machines have not managed to replace human work. Google Translate has not eliminated routine work of a human translator for eight years of its existence and still keeps being the main competitor only for paper dictionaries despite of complicated analyzing algorithm of human translated texts on the Internet and a lot of additional features. Recently different media wrote about incorrect translation the phrase “dignity revolution” in Google Translate, which means the imperfect systems and its vulnerability.

Therefore, profession of translator still keeps being actual and definitely is going to be such several next years. That is not a secret that mow the most needed knowledge in linguistic and philological areas is possessing grammatically complicated languages, i.e. Chinese, Arabic, Japanese or enough rare ones, i.e. Hebrew. Furthermore, every day there appear more and more data requiring translation: audio, video, articles, researches etc. Besides data, there grows the quantity of specialists of linguistic area and especially, the competition is high among people who know widespread languages i.e. English, French etc.

How did it influence the translation services market in the world?

According to data of the independent research company «Common Sense Advisory”, global market of linguistic services is dynamically emerging. In 2014 there were spent $73 billion only on linguists’ services in comparison with $34 billion in 2013 where 15% of all volume where spent on translation.

            Taking into account common growth tendency and online technologies development it is not hard to define that demand growth for linguistic services will go on and according to preliminary data, will be about 10% till the end of 2015. Furthermore, the research agency forecast increase translation specialists quantity for 42% in 2020, which was 1.5 million persons in 2014.

Translators’ salaries in different countries

The income of an ordinary translator mostly depends on several factors:

·         Whether a specialist has a full-time job or works as freelancer looking for tasks on a freelance platform.

·         Translation or interpreting.

·         Success of a company (for full-time job worker).

·         Work volume.

·         Complexity and prevalence of a language.

·         Location.

It is necessary to add that the freelance translators’ income often may exceed salaries of ordinary employees due to an absence of limit for income sources and location. A freelancer may choose a task with any available payment and customer’s country of habitation and that allows to increase income from executed work. Furthermore, the quantity of tasks can be limited only by specialist’s available time. However, the work in prosperous company with high salary in such countries as the USA, Canada and Germany guarantees stable and well-paid job without necessity of permanent search of orders. Unfortunately, not every even highly qualified linguist manages to get a job in such companies abroad, but fortunately, there is another option.

Zhanna Ona: I'm not a DJ

How do you think what inspires creativity: writing texts and poems in different languages, making music and creating performances?

In this edition of “Stories and Languages” Polyglot discussed creativity and language communications with Zhanna Ona, a clubbish artist who travels a lot and appears on the biggest  European and US festival stages.

This tender girl stood at the origins of electronic music in Ukraine. Inspired by creativity of British trip-hop bands Portishead and Massive Attack, an 18-year-old Kiever Zhanna Dymchenkodecided to create her own music. However, it was not the best time for creative startup. In the early 1990s, in Ukraine it was impossible to record electronic music professionally, for beginners especially. Having enlisted support from the soul mate young producers, this girl could finally take that first step towards her dream.  She began performing in Kiev clubs, worked in tandem with DJs from Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 2001 Zhanna’s creative activity brought her to Spain. She has been living and working here in Barcelona for 15 years already.   

– For electronic music fans Zhanna Ona is more known as DJ Zhanna. However, you don’t consider yourself a DJ. Why?

– Any artist who stands on the electronic stage is a musician who makes both live performance and DJ set. That’s why I always try to make it clear that I am an artist, musician, vocalist who makes a DJ set. I don’t want to disparage DJing profession. I like it very much because it brings fresh note at my music career. However, at the same time I don’t claim some exorbinant level of playing. That’s why I keep saying that I’m not a DJ.   

– How do you think, is it important to be a musician to practise DJing?

– I think there are two ways to enter this profession. It is quite logical that electronic dance music amateur turns DJ. Today it can be vividly illustrated by the examples of many famous DJs.  A musician can also try his hand in DJing. But they often try it as an experiment to extend their creative range. Both of these ways deserve respect.

– Can you be qualified as a freelancer? I think that your activity is within this definition: you act independently and do self-promotion…

– You can qualify me as a pioneer in the field of autoproducing (editor’s note: self-producing). In this regard I am autossuficiente (self-sufficient) orpolifacetico (all-round) as they say in Spain. As an author and artist, I always understand and feel what my music should eventually be in meticulous nuances, how it should sound. That’s why I had to dive into so many professions to control every step of the process: from studio recording, instruments choosing, stenography, stylistics and numbers producing to my performance site choosing.    

By the way, such an all-round experience was of use when I and my soul mate friends created a platform for producing young musicians here. The artists who occurred after the early 2000s couldn’t make out what direction they should follow. The part of the industry that dealt with talent search has disappeared. Maybe people had an idea of disk recording because technology was already available that time, but they had no idea what to do further, how to bring it to market. That time we started using social networks (Facebook, MySpace) to promote artists.   

– You continuously refer to some companions, soul mate friends. Who are the people you cooperate with? Who are your friends?

– As soon as I moved to Spain, I was offered cooperation with Sound School that trains Record/Music Producers, Sound Mixers, Recording Engineers and Concert/Performance Tour Specialists.   Thanks to this School I’ve met a lot of great people, particularly global producers and artists. Since then we are good friends with Ken Stringfellow (a musician and member of The Posies and R.Е.M. bands) andFelix Da Housecat.

– How are you accepted by the Spanish audience? Do they understand your music or not?

– What is most interesting is that I perform mostly out of Spain now. I had a big tour when I presented my first album here. It was then, but not now. Here I create and produce my music, however, I give my performances in the USA, Ukraine and other European countries.  The thing is that some other musical genres are popular here, particularly flamenco, its modernized versions, jazz and different folk streams. Indipop is gaining popularity. British involvement is noticeable here. Spanish electronic artists travel other countries as I do. Experience shows that Spanish people perceive music differently and they are not my audience.

– What are your impressions of Spain? What inspires you to create?

– First of all, it is the atmosphere. It turned out that I imagined it differently. As a creative person I have built my own castles in the air. I thought I went to refined Europe, but I found myself in underground. However, the atmosphere is so favorable and empowering here! It helped me deal with the post-Soviet close-mindedness. Here I realized who I am and what I’m capable of. That’s why this place became mystic for me.  It should also be noted that my first bright impression of Spain was welcoming and kind people. I was totally fascinated by the architecture. It is very interesting to live in the city where you can read and look through all the epochs including the ancient world. Everything has withstood the ravages of time.  

– Well, and Antoni Gaudi, of course…

– Gaudi is an outstanding example of artist who was popularized during his lifetime, found the resources and way for realizing his outlandish ideas. Gaudi phenomenon inspires me even more than Gaudi artist. By the way, in Catalonia there is a specific Jewish influence. Both Catalans and Jews are very pragmatic. They weight all the pros and cons and think several moves ahead. That’s why there is a sufficient number of inventive people who find daring and original methods of promotion here.      

– Knowledge of language is one of the most important tools of self-promotion in different culture. How did you learn Spanish?

– I came here with a basic knowledge of English without any specific practice. Although, that time I tried to write my songs in English. As soon as I moved here, I took my one-year Spanish language courses. The beauty of it was that I had to speak Spanish straight away in spite of my language level. I could use dictionary any time, but we spoke in Spanish only. It was easy for me to learn because of my deliberate awareness of communication. In three weeks I could speak Spanish much better. Some people choose another way, save their funds, learn foreign languages by themselves step by step. But expression was of great importance for me. I needed to bring my position and my views into people’s minds whether in store or in work. I needed to make new friendly and professional relations. My knowledge of Spanish allowed me to integrate into this culture. I got acquainted with different people: writers, artists, musicians. And it was so interesting how everything is interrelated in the world. You suddenly find out that some local poet met Vysotsky somewhere in Paris and they wrote something together. Or, for instance, we had a joint project with local Rock Stars of the 1990s. Some artists gathered together and created the album based on Leopoldo Panerо creativity. This poet writes about Tsvetaeva in one of his poems. Such a synthesis of cultures was a real discovery for me. I always participated in different literary and poetry events. Some time ago I lived next door to man who was friends with great-grandson of Trotsky’s killer. So here I have the “Klondike” of interesting stories.

Cultural adaptation had a great impact on my creativity. At first I kept writing songs in Russian and in English, then gradually I started writing poems in Spanish. And when Spanish ingrained in my head, I had to improve my English to keep writing songs in English.

– Did you feel any discomfort?

– No, I didn’t. For me it was a fascinating journey through subcultures and linguistic spaces.

– Well, sure… if you do something to make your wish come true, it will be a pleasure for you! I suppose you like travelling…

– Yes. By the way, we spent the whole last year travelling. We have visited Bali, Hawaii, Turkey, Crimea and Kiev. We inspired, I recorded… different sounds of nature: the noise of the sea, sound of pouring rain. I even have the records of Easter Carols.  

– I hope that in near future your love for travel will bring you to Ukraine again. Thank you for a nice conversation. What would you like to say to our readers?

– I like 2Polyglot.com project very much. It unites people, because the more languages we speak, the more we get closer to each other. I wish you success and good sailing!  

2Polyglot

2Polyglot

All is Fair in War or How to Motivate Employees for Efficient Work

Eventually the question of motivating employees appears in front of every employer. In this moment there emerge several questions, which requires clear answers: how to make employees work harder and more efficient? What kind of tricks have to be implemented in a company in order to receive better results from company activity? The experience of international freelance marketplace for linguists 2Polyglot will show how the company implemented competition between its departments.

Primary goals of the competition were:

·        To define the most efficient way of traffic attraction for short-time period;

·        Service promotion;

·        Renew employees’ energy in summer while everybody is dreaming about vacation and the sea;

·        Increase website traffic.

All employees were divided into three groups according to their positions:

·     SMM (2 persons);

·     SEO (5 persons);

·     PR (4 persons).

Unique links with UTM marks were created for each group. Therefore, it was possible to follow total amount of clicks in Google Analytics.

As for the term, this competition has lasted less than a month from July, the 7-th till August, the 3-rd.

Departments were supposed to use their “special” tools for attracting visitors to the site, but each team had its own tactics and used everything what was necessary.

 Social media team used usual ways of promotion: everyday posts of 2Polyglot public pages in such social networks as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Vkontakte, Pinterest, Tumbler, comments on similar pages and adding new friends. Of course, this all was accompanied with unique links with marks. As a result, significant flow of visitors every day on the site. Social media advertising did not count.

Employees of this department attracted new visitors due to posting articles, infographics and press-releases with the help of paid or free resources. Furthermore, there were also actively used social networks, as colleagues posted comments with links in different topic-related groups. In that moment paid advertising of the website has not been launched yet, that is why toolkit was limited for SEO specialists.

PR managers posted free articles on different portals on various topics with their unique link. But the thing is that many websites do not allow any kind of links in published articles and that was a pretty significant obstacle for this department. Sometimes PR cooperated with SMM specialists (i.e. asked them for sharing published articles in public pages and groups) and any misunderstanding was not recognized. Furthermore, during competition there was launched mass emails sending, which is under jurisdiction of PR-department) and it also gave some quantity of visits.

Trickeries are also fair…

It should also be mentioned that the competition was not ended without tricks from some participants. There were attempts  to use nonstandard methods in all teams including cunning ones. For example, one of employees was asked to compose press-release for SEO team, but he has added his own link to the text having decided to make a profit from the situation. SEO specialists did not recognize it and launched paid press-release mass sending. Therefore, they gave to competitors additional traffic due to own inattentiveness. This situation demonstrates the presence of passion in one big team where all participants work for one project. All is fair in war.

After conclusion every participant of teams put particular small sum of funds into the “bank”. Total amount of money was the price for the winners. No employee lost a lot, but the prime inspired winners for further success.

Consequences of the competition

At first, new website visitors. During the competition, the total amount of visitors increased almost triple. As a result, SMM team won, which had attracted more visitors than two other departments had together. It is necessary to add that such effect is objective and true for short time period.

At second, visitors attraction mechanism. As it was concluded, the most efficient tool had occurred to be sharing information via social media. Due to correct work of SMM results may exceed the expectations.

At third, participants’ impressions. It is possible to confirm that both sides of the competition winners and losers were satisfied. The event occurred to be interesting and inspired employees in lazy summer season.

Anyway, we realized that such events can be very useful for motivation to work harder and that leads to more successful project promotion, in this case this is 2Polyglot.

Freelance linguistic marketplace 2Polyglot: the history of creating

Andrew Prudko shares his personal experience of launching international online platform 2Polyglot, which is oriented on linguistic freelancers.

The idea of creating an international linguistic platform did not appeared without purpose. As it always happens, at first, it emerges some kind of issue requiring solution and then you realize that it would be great if it this solution was a little easier and more comfortable, but you are obliged to get along on existing ways. So as we had the need to translate the website of our marketing company to different languages. But, unfortunately, in our team there were no polyglots, so we thought, “Hm-m, what if to create our own, but digital one”?

Actually, that’s how it usually works: there is a common issue, which needs solving and if you manage to solve it, you will have a successful business.

We faced an issue, which was in the fact that we had to browse through different multipurpose freelance services in order to find a convenient translator. And that usually leads to time wasting. Therefore, we started our search for a specialized marketplace where we could find a freelancer, but we did not manage to get one. Most of them have plenty of specialists’ types such as designers, programmers and so on, though the necessary one was absent.

We have realized that a lot of people and companies, which need services of translation, actually face the same issue every day. We have made a research and received data turned out to be quite interesting. According to American research company “Common Sense Advisory”, a market of world linguistic services is dynamically emerging. Furthermore, in 2014 $73 billion was spent for translation services; 1.5 million professional translators exist on Earth; rate of translation specialists increase will be 42% till the end of 2020 and 15% will be the rate of translation market increase till the end of the same year.

From this moment, we have decided that freelance linguists deserve separate platform and their profiles should not be lost among plenty of accounts of IT-specialists. Then another quite difficult task appeared, which required creative approach – choosing the right brand name. As platform is linguistic and connected with languages, then our website had to show that it possessed foreign languages knowledge. So at once the word “polyglot” emerged by itself. But the thing is that obviously, such domain name was already taken. The decision could be only in adding one word more, which could make the project name too complicated or a digit instead of a word, i.e. “four” sounding similar to “for”. But the research showed that this digit had a doubtful reputation in China, because Chinese “four” sounds similar to “death” in Chinese. Furthermore, they even often replace fourth floor fascia in hotels with “3a” or simple “F”. This tetraphobia (phobia of the 4 digit) influenced all areas of Chinese life, so we decided to express our respect towards Chinese culture taking into account that the project is international and access to Chinese market is important to us. That is why we stopped at “2” digit having decided to turn “2” into a globe on our logo confirming we work in the entire world.

From this moment the official work on creating new platform for freelance translators, copywriters, language tutors and tour guides reached its origin. Step by step website was developed and on the 24-th of March in 2015 the platform was officially launched in two languages: English and Russian. It does not look like a real polyglot, right? Anyway, it was only the first day, so as it is said, to be continued.

Then we faced an issue of choosing a convenient electronic payment system and this topic can be another separate post, because of too many details. I will only say that in the end we have chosen PayPal as other different payment systems had conditions, which did not fit our interests, i.e. high rates of fees, absence of possibility to keep money on the system without sending to a bank account and so on.

Since we have launched 2Polyglot, we have created 4 versions.., excuse me, “F” versions of the service in English, Russian, French and Ukrainian. By the way, we did not hesitate to make much translation work on the site having used services of executors registered on it. So our users helped us to develop our marketplace and we proved the necessity of this project by our own example. More than 3 thousand linguistic freelancers have registered on the site with total traffic of 25,000 visits per month since March. And this is only for “3a” months after launch! I believe that qualified services of language area will soon be associated with our platform and all who need to find freelance work will come 2 Polyglot. 

2Polyglot Started the Cycle of Interviews with Celebrities

         

The outstanding PR campaign was created in a modern startup 2Polyglot, which is online platform for freelance linguists able to provide with such services as translation, language tutoring, copywriting, and tour guiding.

Internet service gathered professional linguists from various countries on one website and is assigned to defend interests of both Executors and Customers due to special feature called “Safe Purchase”, which gives a possibility to reserve Customer’s funds and lets refund them if an order has not been executed in time. That’s why all users can be totally sure they will not lose their money. The main project goals are satisfying customers by efficient, quick, professional work for adequate price and giving the possibility of receiving a part-time job on the Internet to freelancers.

The campaign sense consists of interviews with famous people about the foreign languages role in personal lives and careers of known people.

The first celebrity who was interviewed by journalists in frames of the  PR campaign in 2Polyglot became famous American singer Stereolizza (real name is Ekaterina Shalayeva). Actually, the author world known hit “X.Y.Z.” was born in Russia, but moved to Ukraine with parents and graduated from the Institute of International relations. Famous performer has been living in the USA in Los-Abgeles for abour 7 years, so she really knows the importance of the being at home in foreign languages in the career of a pop star. Stereolizza shared her experience and some tips about languages role specially for freelance marketplace 2Polyglot.

“When you learn some language, it stays passive. This point is significant enough to practice live communication. You may have a perfect knowledge of grammar, You may pass tests with an excellent grade, but when people start communicating for real, they get nervous and feel like that all this time they spent on learning languages became worthless. In fact, it’s not the true. All the knowledge you have been keeping will become useful at the right moment . All accumulated skills will appear in the need. Do not be afraid of real communication. You shouldn’t be scared of mistakes. Relax and  imagine that this language  is your native one.When I arrived in United States, I had some additional work for living, because in that time I was not a celebrity, that’s why I had to work hard… Well, I’ ve realized that a lot of Americans write incorrectly in grammar, they usually make many mistakes. I was frequently asked how to write different words in English. I want to say that in our country (Ukraine) a wonderful school exists, so no hang-ups about it”.

Stereolizza also provided 2Polyglot with a positive and inspiring feedback, “I wish 2polyglot.com wide popularity! I’m sure this project is very important and will be in high demand. So it will  definitely have a successful future”.

 Linguistic platform for freelancers is preparing an interview with next celebrity who is Spanish singer Zhanna. She will also tell her story and share her personal experience about necessity of knowledge of foreign languages, which helped her in a career.          
Full interview with Stereolizza