Today I am going to be a diva and complain a little bit about the number of emails I receive.

This should also be considered job-seeking advice for translators that want to proceed beyond the first stage of our pipeline. (If you are dyslectic I would like to apologise immediately).

Those of you who know me personally are aware that I am not the most organised person in the world. I think I have the unofficial record in Northern Europe for missed flights. But it’s time to take action since I am running low on storage space.

Job-seeking advice number 1: Address the email to the person you are sending it to, which in most cases would be our Recruitment Manager Eolo Barilari. This information is easily available under the contact us section of our website. If you haven’t checked out our website before you apply, we are not really interested in hearing from you. I am considering to delete all applications that start with Dear Sir/Madam.
[articlequote text=”What person in their right mind would do business with a company called All-In Transactions?”] Job-seeking advice number 2: My teacher from elementary school once told me that one of the most annoying things you can do to a person is to mispronounce or misspell their name. I didn’t think much of it then, but nowadays I feel this agony on a semi-daily basis. My full name is Roy Pedersen. So stop messing with both my first name and my surname, please. Again, for the thousand time, I am not Roy Pederson.
Kudos to the Swedes for travelling a lot, but is it such a strenuous job to distinguish an e from an o? There is more than 80% fail rate here, and that is when the instigator has my name written in front of them. If I just say my name, the fail rate is 98%-ish. I am neither Ray, Pedris, Peterson, Peperson (my favourite) or similar. (If the misspelling was caused by my awful hand writing, I take full responsibility).

Another thing which is often misspelled is the company name. On a good day, I can forgive someone for not using a capital i in All-In Translations (at least it can be discussed), but when a certain bank incorporated the company in their system as All-In Transactions, I was quick to change bank. What person in their right mind would do business with a company called All-In Transactions?
Allow me to count to 10 before I continue.
Job-seeking advice number 3: Be specific. With few exceptions, we are hiring translators with proven gaming experience. We would like to know about your passion for sports, your enthusiasm for games, your ability to make a translation sound like it was written in your language rather than literally translated. We receive hundreds of applications every month, and you have to stand out in order to succeed.
Job-seeking advice number 4: Follow the instructions from the job advertisement. We obviously prefer translators that have the ability to carefully follow instructions. If you are failing at that in your first email to our company, the rest of the application will have to be very convincing. A common example: We asked the applicant to elaborate on their experience with gaming, but the applicant failed to mention it with a single word. You can see all of our job openings here.
Job-seeking advice number 5: Be personal. The last thing I want from an application is to get the feeling I am talking to a robot or reading a template/mass email.
Job-seeking advice number 6: Sorry, but I will not consider application emails that have a body text that fits two or more of these descriptions: 1) More than two text colors 2) More than two font sizes and 3) More than two alignments. Apologies to the company which sent the below email, but I am only trying to give some good advice.

Job-seeking advice number 7: Don’t be a spammer. It is common for scammers to steal the identity of translators and spam translation companies with their “application”. When the scammers get someone on the hook, they deliver something translated by Google and hope to get paid before the client notices the problem. This BRILLIANT site called translator-scammers.com is a superhero in the translation community as they dedicate their work to listing all scammers’ email addresses. We have developed the ability to smell these scammers from far away, but it’s still annoying having to delete and report these emails over and over again.
On the upside, I have decided to hire a virtual assistant to do this for me. She will start this week and I am very excited!
PS: Now you know how to apply, you can check out which positions to apply for.