 So, today's video is in response to a question that I received from LaVie Meraki, I don't know. And she, I believe it was a she asked the question as a comment here on YouTube. She asked, could you make a video explaining how to make a translation portfolio for beginners? And so, this is something that I wanted to get into briefly because portfolio is something that is very important and it helps a lot. And I've been asked this a couple of times by various people how to create their portfolio. And so I thought I should get into some of the nitty-gritty for this because it's very easy to create your own portfolio and it shouldn't be a reason to delay getting started. And you know, because it is very helpful to have. So, option number one, the best way to create a portfolio is to take a translation you perform for a client before, something obviously that's not copyrighted or that's not private or anything like that, but that's in the public domain and then just show the source text and the target text, show the original stuff in the original language, the translated stuff in the target language and post it up side by side. If you have three or four of these and ideally you can have as many as you want, but no one's going to read through too many of those. But if you can have three or four in your target specific industry or specialty, like if it's legal or medical or whatever it might be and in the two languages, then that's perfect. And yeah, and at that point you're set and you can leave it as is every now and then maybe you want to update it as your translations get a bit better, but that's all you need. Of course, many times for many people that isn't an option because you're trying to get your first client or your first clients, but you don't have a portfolio so they don't want to hire you, but you can't get a portfolio without having had clients. And so it's the usual chicken and the egg issue. So what can you do? Well, here again, there are various other options and one option, which I recommend very often is to do a translation for free. Now, because most people won't say no to a translation for free, to a free translation. And what you can tell them is say, look, I'm trying to build up my portfolio and so would it be okay if I do this translation for you for free? No money, but then I can use it in my portfolio. If I were at it like I've said many times before, I would also see if you can get a rating or referral as long as they're happy with the translation, they can give you a good rating. But you can see how you feel about that. But yeah, most people won't say no to a free translation and worst case, they really don't like it and in which case you should probably work on your translation skills. But as long as it works well, then you can take the translation and you can use that as well. And there's no reason you can't because you did it for the certain client and it's your translation there. So that's option number two, do something for free. By the way, and do something for free, you can find places to do free translations for TED talks, for translators without borders. In fact, I have a whole video out there of where you can perform translations for free. If you search for it, you'll find it and so there you have a lot of options where you can perform free translations and use these translations for your portfolio and also hopefully maybe for a rating or referral if you can. So that's that option there. Now, but maybe for some reason you can't have that option. Maybe you have a rare language combination so you can't even find someone to perform a translation for free for. So what do you do? Well, another option you can do is just to perform a translation. What you do is you search for websites in your source language and you'll find a website somewhere in a source language that has not been translated to the target language. So you translate their website or a page or two of their website. And that's it. Then you email them and say, hey, look, I translated your website because I need a portfolio and I needed to work on it to build up my portfolio. So you can use it if you want, it's there. Here's the translation. Feel free to use it for free. And I hope you like it. And then hopefully they do like it. And then you can use that in your portfolio because you perform the translation. And in fact, if they post it up, then you can see where the original came. And so yeah, if you find various, look, and this can be it doesn't have to be an official person. It could be someone's profile page even. And then you find someone's profile page offered to translate it into Arabic say and say, look, I translated your profile page into Arabic. And you want to use it. They'll be like, yeah, OK, why not? And then you can use that as your portfolio. Or it can be anyway, it can be whatever you find that hasn't been translated yet online. And then you can use that, which brings me to another option of this. Even if it's hard for you to find just individual websites to translate, then you can find a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia works by people like you or me who can just write something and put it up. It's by the users. And so what you can do is try to find a Wikipedia page, which is in your source language, but has not been translated into your target language and just translate it. You use all the same sources, use all the same everything, but just translate it. And in fact, you'll be surprised. I've written a couple of pages that have gone up to Wikipedia. And I was very surprised that, first of all, they accepted them like that. And I'm like, wow, anyone could just write anything. But then I was even more surprised at how quickly they came with all the corrections and the edits and then so they're really on top of their stuff. They know what they're doing. So if you do make any mistakes, they'll be caught right away. But if you find a text in a certain language that hasn't been translated yet into the other language on Wikipedia, then translate it. And as soon as they're both up there, of course you can use those as your portfolio. You can use any translation you've performed as your portfolio. The only thing is you don't want to use anything that is not in the public domain because then it can go against whoever. But as long as it's someone's public website or Wikipedia or anything along those lines, of course it's in the public domain that's out there. So all these are good options to create a portfolio. If none of these work and you don't have any other option, then what you can do, what I think is the last resort, is basically to take a text, even that you wrote or that you find written somewhere or wherever might be an email that you have, and translate that into your target language. Now, this is a translation you've performed. So you can put it up there, one language next to the other. And this depends where if you have it on pros.com, they give you the areas to put it in, or if you put on translator's cafe or wherever it might be. Or just on your general website of your profile page, you put one text the other in the source language, target language, however you want. Now, any translation you've made, you can put up there. Of course, the problem with just creating, just taking some random text, translating it randomly and putting it up there, is that if people ask, which client did you do this for? When was it for? You don't really have any answer. But it's still a translation you've performed. And in fact, you could take a newspaper article, a short newspaper article in one language and just translate it into another language and put it up there. That's public domain. Now, you cannot say that it's an official translation. You can't say you performed it for them as a client or anything like that, but you performed that translation and you translated that text. And so you can definitely put it up there. As far as I know, there's no issue with it. I don't see why there would be. And you're not pretending that it's official or anything like that. All you're doing is putting text, that's an original source text that you've translated yourself and you can put those both up. However, I would keep that as a last resort. If you can have something where you actually had a client and you actually did this for someone else and it's been approved, especially if it's been put online or not, but as long as it's been approved and you can use that, then that's the best thing to use. Whether you got paid or not, or it's Wikipedia or any one of those public domain websites or anything like that, then those are the best options, I feel. So yeah, hopefully, and the main thing to take away here is that not having a portfolio is an easy thing to correct. And between all those options, there should be a way for you to be able to create a portfolio so that you can show this to prospective clients to have, I mean, just three or four max. You just need three or four examples of a translation max and that's all you need. In fact, if you have one translation that was pretty long, you could take a part from somewhere in the beginning and another part from somewhere in the end and use those as two different examples because you don't want a huge long translation in your portfolio, but you can just take two different sections and that's fine as well. You just need examples of your translation so people can see what you've done, what you've performed. Of course, it needs to be your translation. If it's not your translation and someone else performed it, then that's fraud. And as far, I've never heard of anyone doing that, but I would think you get kicked off the website if you use one of the official websites to do that or something like that. But either way, don't do that. Use a translation that you've performed and that way everything is good and honest and proper. But yeah, those are pretty much the options I have. If you have other options, by the way, for creating a portfolio, feel free to let me know because I'd love to hear about them. But otherwise, not having a portfolio should not be something to delay getting started too much. In an afternoon, you should be able to knock out a couple of these and one way or the other. And so you should be able to at least start off with something. And by the way, as you get going and get more clients, you can raise the caliber of the translations you have. And so you can get better and better sample translations and a better portfolio to use in terms of translations that you use. So yeah, I hope you found this useful. If you have other examples, please feel free to let me know. Otherwise, don't forget to subscribe if you haven't. Please like this if you do. Don't forget to click on the little bell thing after you subscribe so you get notified when there are new videos. And that's all I have to say for now. I'll see you in the next video. Okay, thanks. See you soon.