Dear Langmates,

  I welcome all new translators and translation agencies who have joined Langmates.

  We have 2 new people in our team this year. They will help us develop Langmates even better and faster.

  You may have noticed that we have improved the anti-spam system in the recent months and continue to support comfortable speed of the Web-site with more and more people joining in. It is thanks to the great work of our new team member - Vitaly Nikolaev.

  Igor Martynyuk, another skilled newcomer to our team, will join Vitaly in May.

  We welcome your suggestions on further development of Langmates Network.

Kind regards,

Vladimir.

Adding a vibe to the translation industry is not only about writing and discussing in front of computer... it can be done on real meetings, face-to-face.

Meet the new Langmates feature - Translation Events!

Now any registered user of Langmates can report any translation event out there using Events feature:

Other users may respond to the event. This way translators can know who among their colleagues is going to some event, and get acquainted with each other even before event happens. You can even invite your friends to join you on some event.

Also, after event is over, you use Event feature to keep your event connections and post pictures.

I really hope that Langmates and Events feature in particular will help our users to meet more often in virtuality and reality, and bring up vibe and energy to the translation industry.

Kind regards,

Vladimir.

P.S. Langmates allows events backdating. Therefore, if you have pictures from past ATA Conference or some translation workshop/seminar, feel free to report event with past dates and put your pictures or comments there.

P.P.S. Last but not least, users are rewarded for reporting event or responding to the event. Feel free to contact our support  in case of any questions or ask them by commenting this blog entry.

We felt uneasy participating in the Top 100 Langmates user rating. Our purpose is to serve users behind the scenes, providing you with reliable and feature-rich communication platform. YOU are the main actors and stars! We moved our team member profiles to the Team page. And heroes of the community are showcased on the
Top Users page as before.

P.S. New Langmates features are close to release. You will see them next week!

On Langmates, you earn langpoints for each and every piece of activity. That's a bonus to active members for adding 'human face' to the translation industry.

Feel free to spend you langpoints by exchanging them with real products available at Langpoints Shop. It will not affect your Experience and position in Top Users because Experience is the total of all your langpoints accrued during existence of your Langmates profile.

Many thanks to all members who spread the word about Langmates!

Enjoy!

We have been very busy making sure the Langmates is operating efficiently in the first days after the launch.

So busy that we have almost missed the important landmark: our membership grew from 20 beta testers to the lively community of 1000 members in 9 days!

My best greetings to all of you and to the 1000th user - Samuel Murray from Cape Town, South Africa.

I am really enthusiastic about our emerging world and its future role within the translation industry. Just look around :) There are 1000 of interesting and friendly people who really love their profession.

Have a great weekend and do not forget to take your photo camera with you :) I am sure your colleagues would be delighted to see that there is a life behind deadline :)

Enjoy!

Only 2 days since its birth, Langmates is already becoming a busy place! We have just added new feature Top 100 Langmates, where you can see the most active users of our newborn translation community.

If you are unsure to what start with, here are some ideas:

  you can share photos of your ultimate translation workplace; I have heard that many translators have double or triple monitors and super-keyboards;

  you can share photos from your winter holiday;

  you might write about your professional targets; ups and downs of your career; give useful advices to your colleagues;

  post a movie review of the film you watched, and the quality of how it was translated;

There is hidden treasure in all of us, and Langmates is designed to help everyone express his or her thoughts and experiences; let us get the fire started! :)

Privacy is important. You can choose your level of privacy by going to Settings (from your Home page) and selecting Settings command:

Then choose Privacy tab. There you can select your privacy setting for Profile, Contacts, and Newsfeed:

Enjoy!

We deal with words. We have to put aside our emotions to do our work in exact and accurate way. This is especially true in technical translation.

But I strongly believe that translators have more energy hidden inside than any other profession. 

  It is a pleasure to release Langmates to the translation community.

  You have probably heard a lot about social networking. There are a dozen of general interest social networks. There are hundreds of specialty networks. Even poets, teachers, and aquarium fish lovers have their own networks. But what about translators? We are in communication profession and do not have social networking platform :) Yes, there are translation groups, translation forums, and translation job portals scattered over the Internet. But they serve as discussion platform, not as platform for networking and communication with each other directly.

  And Langmates fills the gap. So what is Langmates about? Langmates is about people. I believe that translators have a lot to say and to show to each other. That's why we have started to roll out our release from 3 main parts - contacts, blogs and photos.

  Let us bring the vibe to the translation industry!

Browsing our software development archive I have found out the exact date Langmates.com development started - 25 November 2005 :)

That's how it looked in the middle of 2006 (front page):