This feature has been deprecated and now Nakōdo is open to the public. You can search Nakōdo here.
TM-Town is releasing a new personalized Nakōdo search preview page that you can send to potential clients to help differentiate yourself from the crowd. This feature was requested by a TM-Town member as an additional way he could use to demonstrate his experience when applying for a translation job or wooing a potential client.
I think freelancer translators (and freelancers from all professions) share common career goals including:
The path to achieve these goals has one undeniable thing in common - hard work. There are no shortcuts to building a professional reputation and a great client base.
In addition to hard work, one point I often stress here on TM-Town is the importance of specialization. If you have to choose between being a generalist and a specialist, I recommend specializing.
TM-Town is built to help translators who choose this path. On TM-Town you can carve out your niche and own it - and TM-Town's Nakōdo search will help you get discovered in your field(s) of expertise.
Freelancers often seek advice on how to increase their income or raise their rates. A large part of this comes down to conveying and marketing your value to clients. While you may consider yourself a linguist, being a freelancer also means you need to excel at business and marketing.
One of TM-Town's goals is to help you with this. To help translators better demonstrate their expertise and experience. To help translators get discovered by clients needing translation in that translator's field(s) of expertise.
Nakōdo is one manifestation of this goal. With Nakōdo a client enters the text of a document she or he needs translated and the language of the desired translation. TM-Town's system analyzes the terminology of the document and compares it against documents translators have loaded into TM-Town's system and recommends the best specialists who have translated similar material.
The interesting part of Nakōdo is that it favors translators who have specialized. Translators who have loaded documents heavy with domain specific terminology are much more likely to come out on top of a Nakōdo search than those who have only uploaded very general documents.
So how can you use Nakōdo to help you achieve your goals and boost your translation business? The first step is loading work in your field(s) of expertise. If you are not able to load work try completing a sample translation from TM-Town's source text catalog.
Your Nakōdo preview page is a personalized search engine that you can share with potential clients. From this link clients can search different source texts and see where you appear in the results. Other translators are shown in the results, but their data is anonymized. Only your profile information is fully visible to the potential client. This is a great way to demonstrate your experience to potential clients.
You can either share a link to this personalized page with your client, or you can include your personalized Nakōdo preview badge on your homepage or in your email signature.
This Nakōdo search preview is only available to translators who have have opted-in to Nakōdo. To opt-in for Nakōdo please visit your account settings. Once you have opted-in you will be able to access your Nakōdo Preview Link and your Nakōdo Preview Badge from your account settings page.
While one motivation for providing this preview page is to help you put your best foot forward to clients, a secondary objective is to raise awareness of TM-Town and Nakōdo amongst end clients. Ultimately, the ability to monetize services for end clients and/or translation agencies will help TM-Town continue to provide great products for freelance translators. Additionally, the more end clients and translation agencies are aware of TM-Town, the better chance you'll have of getting discovered.
When you apply for a job as a translator you need to work hard to make yourself stand out. A polished CV, a personal web page, profiles on the major translation portals, and industry certifications are all ingredients to a better chance at landing your next client. Your Nakōdo search preview page is one more way to make yourself stand out from the crowd.
Are you a professional translator who understands the importance of specialization? Have you tried TM-Town? If not, give it a shot, TM-Town is a free service for freelance translators.
Kevin Dias
TM-Town Developer
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