Poll: Has a LinkedIn profile helped you get direct customers?

Kay Denney wrote:
I'm pretty amazed that nobody here has had a similar experience, my profile can't be that much better than everyone else's!

Baran Keki wrote:


I remember you mention this multiple times. Could it be that you've been just lucky? I know that some people are averse to the idea of 'explaining success with luck', but in my experience luck accounts for a great deal. For example, I found a client from the 'hated' Proz job board some years ago which ended up earning me over $20k. Can I defend the Proz job board off the back of that?

Yaotl Altan wrote:

If you answer many Kudoz, you will be in Proz's top ranks. Of course, a lot of positive WWA's help too.

Those 2 features have strengthened my professional career much more than the months I was married to LinkedIn.

Kay Denney wrote:

As for luck with LinkedIn, I don't know. I made contact with a lot of former colleagues who went on to found their own agency, or work at other agencies, and they have almost all sent me work. Others who started freelancing in other language pairs have recommended me to their clients. That's not luck, it's good networking and being a recommendable translator.

I have also been contacted via LinkedIn by clients from my former employer. They were unhappy with the quality of translation, and once they realised that I was no longer working there, they came looking for me, and found me on LinkedIn. That's not luck, that's being a good translator and having a profile and letting people contact me via the profile.

As for the clients who came looking for me on LinkedIn, I suppose there was something in my profile that appealed to them. Is that luck? The agency I now work regularly for, was looking for someone with precisely my specialist fields of art and architecture and tourism. Was it a stroke of luck that they decided to look at LinkedIn and my name cropped up in their search and they liked what they saw?

Baran Keki wrote:

My understanding was that you need to be 'active' on LinkedIn, which means you have to post and share annoying articles, like, upvote, comment on others' posts, 90 percent of which is cringeworthy, cheesy PC rubbish or 10 steps to improve your ..... type articles/posts.
But if you've found clients through your former contacts or word of mouth or been referred to by them, that's, of course, not luck. Plus you're likely to stand out if you specialize in a certain niche like art and architecture as opposed to being a technical or legal translator, again that's not luck. Apologies if I offended you.

Kay Denney wrote:
Trying to think of when luck was on my side, I'd say when someone I meet socially turns out to need a translator (which has happened twice), that's luck. But when they come back for a second job, that's talent.

Baran Keki wrote:


What if that translator happened to be translating into Serbian or Turkish, on what basis would you say they were talented? By the fact that they delivered on time or you (as the translation agency) did not receive any complaints from your client about their work? What if their work weren't as good as you thought? Say, if the target language were English or French you'd be totally disappointed, but since you don't speak a word of Serbian or Turkish you have no way of knowing?
Everybody in the language business (be it PMs, VMs, agency owners anywhere in the world) speaks English and, to a certain extent, is able to separate a good translator from the bad one if the target language is ENGLISH (sorry about the caps, I don't have the html skills to bold or italicize words in a post, or am not bothered to learn how to do it at the moment, but would appreciate it if somebody were to educate me).
As a PM working in France, you can assess the quality and talent of EN>FR translators and your colleagues at the agency can do the same with those translating into German, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese. But what about those translating into Turkish, Georgian, Bulgarian, Thai, Swahili etc.? How do you see the talent in them?
There is a lot of talentless, incompetent translators out there. I find it pointless to tell the PMs the translation mistakes when I'm doing a revision/proofreading task, because I know they will never comprehend the grammatical, syntactic intricacies involved when the text is in Turkish (I could if it were in German, Dutch or Spanish). The translator's (lucky) run ends when the client begins asking questions about the quality of the translation, but if that doesn't happen they continue to fool the elite boutique agencies in France or elsewhere.

Baran Keki wrote:
But what about those translating into Turkish, Georgian, Bulgarian, Thai, Swahili etc.? How do you see the talent in them?
There is a lot of talentless, incompetent translators out there. I find it pointless to tell the PMs the translation mistakes when I'm doing a revision/proofreading task, because I know they will never comprehend the grammatical, syntactic intricacies involved when the text is in Turkish

Kay Denney wrote:
It transpired that clients were no happier with translations into French, only they could "correct" them themselves, no need to ring the agency. For other languages, it took more time to weed bad translators out.