Mile
Bots telling you that you're a bot
Being a native italian speaker I've been using the Flitto app last year to do translations and see if I could actually make some money. Result: "Too fast! You're clearly a bot so we'll be suspending your account for 2 weeks 😋". Complained to support since I believe I'm not a bot, and they seemed to be the bots to me since they did nothing but repeat their guidelines about not allowing bots. I redeemed my accumulated points (yes, you don't get actual money but "points", and when you want to convert them into money you'll have to pay a fee as well 🙂), pissed off I just left Flitto alone and moved on with my life. This year I get an email inviting me to a New Arcade project on the Flitto website. Again I tried to use it to see if the situation changed. For a few times it worked and I did my share of underpaid work, despite the interface making it extremely difficult for me. Of course I get a rejected assignment saying "we detected machine translation" so no money for that one. Since I kinda got tired of translating out of context sentences and being accused of being a bot or a machine I decided to apply for the Pro 1:1 translation. Boy was that a mistake. Banned again because they detected machine translation, now they dont even allow me to login and claim my payments. They provide screenshot of their funny monitoring program where they check what percentage of your translation is the same as other online automatic translators, and that's their excuse to ban me. First of all machine translations shouldn't be the enemy of a human translator, they should be a tool to speed up the process. The platform doesn't see it that way so it doesn't allow it, alright. The least they could do though is having the basic understanding that this isnt 15 years ago and my human translation is most likely gonna look similar to a machine translation since they evolved and got pretty accurate at providing optimal contextualized translations. The thing you have to focus on doing while translating for Flitto isn't to provide the best translation you can, it's actually the opposite. You have to make sure you use obscure and uncommon wording and synonyms just to make sure you pass their dumbass criteria. A machine telling a human to not be a machine, pretty hilarious. Flitto isn't something you use if you're a translator, it's something you're forced to use if you dont have a degree and can't access other translation gig websites. I don't recommend it to anyone who knows their worth.



