Sending certificates/diplomas ?

Eva Stoppa wrote:

Once they got awarded the project, they used cheaper translators without any qualification.

Lincoln Hui wrote:

Your diploma has a birthday on it?

Lian Pang wrote:



Shouldn't that be considered as fraudulent conduct ?

Woodstock wrote:

I suspect it's to make sure you are who you say you are in light of the abuses when scammers steal a translator's CV to get jobs (and then do shoddy work or machine translation). It's much harder / impossible to steal certificates! Can you cover up the information you don't want to reveal without too much hassle? I wouldn't have a problem with it if that were possible.

Lian Pang wrote:
Recently I've seen quite a few job posting asking service providers to send in their diplomas / relevant certificates. I have never been a fan of doing so as I consider diplomas sensitive information. Especially the serial number and birthday.

Samuel Murray wrote:

There is nothing wrong with asking for identifying evidence or evidence of your qualifications. There is no need to avoid such clients.

José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:

Degrees seem to be extremely important in scam-generating countries. A significant number of scam e-mails I get begin with My name is Attorney Mwamba Robada... If I intended to reply, I'd feel tempted to write Dear Attorney, may I call you Tony?

On another front, there seems to be a widespread demand for 'people who can wing at translation for despicable rates', whose delivery I've had the chance to witness... their quality being roughly equivalent to the raw output of free online machine translation, or worse, though the nature of the flaws will be different.

I wondered... Why do such bottom feeders hire cheap, lo-grade translation labor, if they could get about the same result from free online machine translation? The only answer I got so far is BLAME. They are not hiring translators, but merely scapegoats.

If an end-client complains, say, in a technical translation, that something like "chevron packing" was translated as "military rank stuffing" in the target language (YES! I've seen this very one happen, back in the early 1970s), they might challenge the translator's credentials. When they do, the cheap agency will show a target-language-country diploma in Mechanical Engineering, to show their due diligence.

When my diplomas are required, I don't send pristine hi-res scans.

I scanned my diploma in Engineering in lo-res, from a not-so-neat Xerox copy, with some notarial stamps on the reverse side showing through. No chance they'll even guess the size of the original parchment.

My sworn translator diploma was badly scanned from the original. Nevertheless, I tell them that it's worth nothing on its own. If they want to check it, I give them the URL where my name must be in the official directory, to evidence that I am STILL licensed as such.

In both cases, though the diplomas are easily readable, not even the best Photoshop artist would be able to rebuild these scans to look like originals, much less to replace my name there with any other without making it stand out like a sore thumb.

If their intentions are good, they can see and read these diplomas. Otherwise, they'll delete them pronto.