Set up a freelancer account

With Smartcat, freelancers can focus on translation and not waste time on non-productive chores. Here’s a short guide to get you started.

In Smartcat, each translator is the master of their profile. You choose your language pairs, services, and rates.

Here, it is customers who find you and not the other way round. Here’s how it looks for a customer:

In theory, having a completed profile is enough to start getting orders. In practice, with 150,000 translators registered on the platform, getting to the top of the search results is not that easy. But not too hard either.

If you have already worked in other CAT tools, you can import all your projects and resources from them.

• From SDL Studio Trados: SDLXLIFF projects, SDLPPX packages, SDLTM translation memories.

• From MemoQ: MQXLIFF projects, TMX translation memories.

• From other CAT tools: XLIFF projects, TMX translation memories.

• Glossaries from Excel spreadsheets.

If you have no previous experience with CAT tools — don’t worry, Smartcat is easy to use even for a beginner.

We use various parameters to order the list of translators in each pair, but one of the main ones is the number of words they have translated in Smartcat. Why? Because it means that the translator (a) has enough work, so it is more likely that they provide good quality, and (b) knows how to use the platform.

So how do you increase this number without new orders coming? Is it a chicken-and-egg problem? Not at all, because you can use Smartcat — for free — for translating texts you receive outside the platform.

Just take any document and create a project based on it.

Open the document in the Editor.

See how Smartcat has split all the text into sentences and put them in a bilingual grid? This makes it easier to work with any document. In addition, Smartcat saves all your translations to the project’s translation memory, so you can reuse them in future projects.

Besides helping with managing translation, Smartcat allows you to receive payments for work done outside the platform — DTP, interpreting, and so on. To do this, fill out the payment request form in the Payouts section.

Your client will receive a link to pay for your work by bank card or wire transfer. Then you will get the payment according to the method selected, that is, via a bank card, wire transfer, or some other methods that depends on the country specified on your profile page.

By the way, if the client stays in Smartcat and hires you for future work right here on the platform, this will further increase your chances to get to the top of the search results.

Good luck and on to exciting translation projects!