Translation scam?

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Posted: Fri May 24, 2013 8:20 am

Received this (to my work email address). Unsure whether it's a scam or not - what do you think?

Quote:

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are a team of freelance translators who have joined to offer you a service to suit all your translating and proofreading needs. Combined, we have over 10 years experience in a variety of translating categories. We are ready to handle any type of translating work you wish to send our way, be it technical, marketing or literary.
Our language pairs include:
English <> Spanish
English <> German
English <> French
English <> Arabic

Working as a team allows us to tap into a wide variety of skills and experience, enabling you to have your needs met in one place. With each project we undertake, we guarantee high quality work, delivered on time. If you wish to test our expertise, send us a small job; you will be pleased.
Please contact us with any questions you may have; we are ready to serve!

With Kind Regards,

And the header:

Quote:

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From: Translation Team <[email protected]>
To: "xxxxxxxxxxxxx.com" <xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com>
Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 01:09:36 +0000
Subject: Freelance translators team up to save you time
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Posted: Fri May 24, 2013 8:32 am

What was the email? Did they send some sort of website? (If you don't want to post them here - PM)

From the looks of it - I'd say it's not a scam. Only advert/spam.

EDIT: And googling parts of their email makes me think so too. Only certain sentences can be googled, but it's definitely not a script and doesn't appear to be reported somewhere.
If you are not interested in team of freelance translators, then you are best off just ignoring it.

Posted: Fri May 24, 2013 8:34 am

^^^

The email was a fairly amateur-looking Gmail address. No website was supplied. I don't really want to post the email address, as if it is a scam, I'd like to start baiting it.

Posted: Fri May 24, 2013 8:34 am

Read my edit. Wink

Posted: Fri May 24, 2013 8:36 am

Hmm shame. I was looking forward to some baiting with my publishing-company character Smile

Posted: Fri May 24, 2013 8:36 am

IP is in Hong Kong. Many months ago someone suspected a translation scam, and tested it by sending a paragraph in an obscure Turkic language, spelled strangely, which he said was an obscure Iranian language. The translators figured out what language it really was, and the baiter concluded that it was not a scam.

What about sending a sample of Na'vi written in a different alphabet? Twisted Evil

Posted: Fri May 24, 2013 9:19 am

^^^ And I would suggest against it. Long time ago my mentor told me - when you are in doubts, just don't. There's plenty of fish in the sea, and should this be a scam - it does not seem to target "as much people as possible" and would probably mostly go unnoticed.

Baiting this "scammer" would be waste of time if it appears to be a regular ITP and, since I've had accidentally tried to bait ITP once, I can guarantee it's not a good feeling in particular that you've been wasting innocent persons time etc.

Maybe a mod can provide better opinion, but you know... just my two cents.

Posted: Fri May 24, 2013 9:46 am

I bet it's a real, smalltime translation company trying to advertise their starting business, maybe in a naive way (if indeed they are widely spamming, vs targeted emails to a particular sector which may still feel spammy if you are on the receiving end).

I've seen a wide variety of these in my day job ranging from highly professional companies with full, old-fashioned websites, all the way down to "individual who knows a second language reasonably well but is clearly no translator".

The language pairs listed are not outrageous and their advert seems very similar to other, ummm, let's call them email cold calls rather than spam, that I have received. Combined 10 years experience, my guess is there are two main translators joining forces, one who can work English-Spanish-German and the other English-French-Arabic. If they have been working freelance before it's conceivable that they are still following this model with their new "company".

It can be hard to distinguish translation scammers from real translators (especially as there are some very bad translators out there offering web services, not necessarily scammy but definitely incompetent). At this stage I strongly agree with Mortal that there isn't good evidence of scam here & it should not be baited. (I put this in bold because this is the tl;dr bit)

All that said, in my opinion it would not really be a problem if you wanted to reply and ask "Do you have a website". I think that wouldn't be excessively leading them on if indeed they are legitimate. If they do have a website, it's much easier to spot signs of fakery than with one email message from a gmail addy. And if it doesn't show signs of fakery, even better reason not to bait.