Cactus Communications Freelance Translator Reviews

Pros

Communicating with staff is easy, they are quick to respond and nice

Cons

Takes some time to get your first assignment.

Pros

Very punctual support for freelancers around the globe. High volumes in many academic fields. Most jobs are well written and interesting. Very professional attitude. Possible to work from any location. Generally relatively good rates of pay.

Cons

Automated Whiteboard job assignment system can be confusing at times. If you miss a job notification or reject too many jobs in a row, you may find yourself without assignments for several weeks. Performance review system opaque. Sometimes job assignments disappear within five minutes. Sometimes job assignments appear at impossible times, like in the middle of the night.

Pros

Good for starting translators Great learning opportunities

Cons

They might not assign you lots of jobs in the beginning

Pros

It's basically a freelance job, meaning you have high flexibility. It is an international company with lots of branches in Asia. The job is pretty well organized, you will receive an email once the job is available for you. If you accept the job, you will see the detailed description including the number of words, fee, a special request from the client, relevant area, etc.

Cons

The workload really varies every month, and you cannot do anything for getting more jobs. Good as a side job, but not suitable as the main job for sure. Also, the deadline is pretty tight, usually you need to get back to them with the translated doc within 1 or 2 days, maximum 5?

Pros

1.Working time flexibility 2. You can work remotely 3. Colleagues are really nice

Cons

I can't get assignments in months.

Pros

Working as a freelance translator for CACTUS Global has been a rewarding, enriching experience to me. I have been developing my scientific writing skills by dealing with a variety of texts. They provide helpful feedback, which has been instrumental in my becoming a better translator.

Cons

Payment might take a little too long to be made, since it happens in the month after jobs are done. Translators are to plan their finances well.

Pros

[Crosscheck] All translation jobs are reviewed by another translator of the same language pair. Cactus calls this the crosscheck phase. This is a luxury translators normally do not have when working with direct clients. I have been grateful each time a careful crosschecker suggested another rendering for some passage I struggled with. [Whiteboard] In general, I find the proprietary submission system easy to use. It provides helpful timers indicating how many hours remain before a job is due. Recent upgrades have eliminated uncertainty for those who frequently jump time zones. However, I do wish the system had better mobile support. It is difficult to check status or decline jobs when away from a PC.

Cons

[Consistency of Work] There are seasonal rushes. During these peak times, you could conceivably make ends meet with Cactus work alone. They coincide with the ends of semesters, presumably when grad students or other academics find that they have deadlines to meet or upcoming conferences to attend. Translators can expect plenty of work in January, March, July, August, and December. The rest of the year is downtime. [Pyramid Structure] I suspect that translators are organized into a hierarchy to maximize the company's project revenue. A large pool of poor quality translators earning an appropriately poor wage (perhaps 1~2 cents per word?) presumably exists at its base. New work is preferentially routed to those translators. Assignments beyond their ability are kicked up to the next level of slightly-higher paid translators, and so on. Thus, the better translation you do, the less likely you are to see consistent work. As the company must always pay for three services on each job (translator, crosschecker, and editor), and because the crosscheck and edit are paid at a flat rate, the company has strong incentive to use the cheapest translator possible for any given job and to hope that any garbled English can be smoothed out during the edit phase. This is speculation, but it would seem to make business sense and fit with the much higher frequency of work reported by editors and the poor English they must decipher. *However, it occurs to me that Editage also offers native English editing services to non-English speaking clients who have performed a translation or written a document themselves. This would certainly also constitute a large portion of the more frequent editing work. [Conditions] Translation is often highly technical and on rush timelines. Your initially agreed upon rate will not change, meaning it is smarter for you the freelancer to accept easy jobs only and to ignore jobs that will require heavy research. Estimate how much you receive per word, how much the crosschecker receives per word, and how much the editor receives per word. Add these figures together and add a healthy margin for the company's in-house expenses and profit. That is how much the clients are paying per word for the assignments you work on. It is also the ballpark figure for technical and academic work with direct clients.

Pros

Flexible time schedule, and the work is easy if you are a good translator.

Cons

The material for translation is sometimes extremely difficult (ex. Ph.D. dessertation abstract) and it requires me to look up the appropriate words for translation. Considering this, the wage is too cheap. Also, the company does not give a lot of work, so this is not a job that will sustain even your minimum living expense. Doing this for a side job is okay.

Pros

Not a bad gig for some part time work and additional income.

Cons

The people who review your manuscripts are rude, and accuse you of not knowing English all while incapable of writing 30 words without egregious spelling and grammatical errors. There is no system in place where you can confront your accuser and try to resolve the situation either.

Pros

They offer competitive pay and steady flow of work. The company has enough managers on staff to address any issues in a timely manner. Very professional.

Cons

I don't really have a major complaint about particular issue. Whatever minor issues I've had with the company, it tends to get resolved within a very short period of time.