Subscription
Subscribe to get expert insights straight to your inbox
Subscription
Scammers could appear everywhere in our daily life. Especially on the Internet, everyone should always be aware and look out for someone trying to steal their personal information, identity, or taking advantage of them for fraud purposes. The same thing might happen in the localization industry. In many countries, there is no such thing as certified or authorized linguists, which basically means everyone with a second language can claim themselves a translator. To identify and avoid the dangerous risk from translation scammers, here is some helpful information for your business.
The more connected is the world, the more important is the translation industry. As it continues to grow, the number of fake translators also rises. Hence, translators today must be highly alerted to make sure they don’t become a victim and that their resumes are far from the hand of those translation scammers. Likewise, translation clients and agencies should also enhance the assessment process to ensure that they’re cooperating with reliable and professional translators.
To achieve this goal, here are some signs for you to detect those fake CVs.
If your recruitment site or recruiting platform announces that applicants should fill in your application form and some of them still try to directly send their profiles, they are likely the fake ones. Generally, scammers will not take time to carefully complete a form as they prefer to send out bulk emails to quickly approach as many companies as possible at a time. However, not everyone who sends their resumes to your address is a scammer. This sign should be generated with others to have the final conclusion.
Another sign to point out those translation scammers is the email’s content. If it does not mention your company information, chances are the email has been sent to a dozen recipients. For example, instead of saying “Dear ABC company”, “Hello Ms. Linda”, they will write “Hello” or “Dear sir/ madam”. It’s highly possible that scammers are hoping that someone will take the bait.
In a language pair, translation chisellers say that they could work in either direction. For example, a person said they can professionally translate from French into English and vice versa. The majority of experienced linguists will understand that it’s difficult to be equally well in both languages within their pair. Because they’re lack of knowledge about the culture, interest, expression of the second language’s country. Obviously, not everyone claiming that they can do it well in both languages of the pair means they are scammers. It’s also possible that they are merely some amateur translators pretending to be professionals.
If the applicants’ CVs present with different layouts and different fonts, especially the editing shows up in the personal information section, it’s likely that the scammers have stolen the online resumes of real translators and replaced the contact data to his own (while remaining your name intact) to get the translation work. This could be easily checked by running a small portion of the CV through search engines. You can tell immediately if the same resume has already been uploaded to the Internet but under different contact points. Although it takes time to research, it will enhance the quality of the recruitment process by eliminating scammed applicants.
Once the translators offer suspiciously low rates, you should mark them with skeptical questions. To provide that ridiculous price, they use machine translation to complete your project without any comprehensive revision. This only can fool the newcomers in finding translation services that have the lowest rates to fit in their budget. After some groundwork, they’ll understand the quote “you get what you pay for”.
