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Certified Translator, stuck in Venezuela, looking for remote freelance work

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Re: Certified Translator, stuck in Venezuela, looking for remote freelance work

#91
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this to this point: 1. USD is the de facto world currency, and many (most?) banks in the world let you open an account in the local currency, plus another account denominated in USD which is absolutely necessary for doing any sort of international business 2. Venezuela's currency collapse is a problem mainly because it needs to import goods (medicine, machine tools, etc.) from the international market, whic…

That's not even close to an accurate assessment. Yes, you can technically have a bank account in Venezuela denominated in USD. However, it would be completely useless for a few reasons. You cannot withdraw USD in Venezuela. Only Bolivares. And when you withdraw Bolivares from a USD denominated account, the bank must do so at the official rate. The official government rate is a complete farce and has no bearing on rea…

The thing is, I don't see how crypto helps solve any of those issues you enumerated.

I did specifically mention that regardless of whether you try to take crypto or USD, if your goal is to immediately convert into bolivares for survival spending, neither is easy or simple, since the government presumably wants to seize any USD it can get its hands on (the extortionate 'official' conversion rate just being a particular method of doing so).

> But at least the barrier of entry for crypto currency is much lower right now that the difficulty of getting an overseas bank account.

I don't see how that is the case, unless you have a specific example? Sure, you can get a crypto account and perhaps get someone to pay you, but you can equally well get a PayPal account denominated in USD, if you didn't already have a foreign bank account.

Neither of those can directly translate into bolivares, but at least the PayPal account can be be easily used to buy physical goods and perhaps get them into the country if you can bypass or bribe your way through customs.

Re: Certified Translator, stuck in Venezuela, looking for remote freelance work

#92
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is most definitely the most used currency for international trade worldwide. It also makes up 64% of all known central bank's foreign currency reserves. If we were to declare a world currency, it would most definitely be USD. Hence why the poster used the term "defacto" I suppose.

Hence I wrote "strong" and "leader in many areas". "World currency" implies more than a dominant use in international transactions though. My overall point is the statement as-is (currency and banks) is somewhat exaggerated.

Currency has three main uses: as a unit of settlement (medium of exchange), unit of account, and as a store of value.

USD is by far the leading currency for all three use cases, and you can tell it's the de facto world currency because even international transactions between non-USD-using parties use USD by default.

Whenever a Japanese bank and a Chinese bank transact, it's in dollars. Whenever Venezuela and Cuba transact, it's also in dollars. Whenever international business happens, also in dollars.

This pattern repeats to the tune of 95%+ of the nominal value of all world transactions. Many countries also peg their currency to the USD, e.g. HKD is basically the US dollar.

That's clearly not true for any other currency, and certainly not crypto. I mean, at what point would you agree that it's really the world currency — only when every single transaction is actually denominated de jure in dollars?

Re: Certified Translator, stuck in Venezuela, looking for remote freelance work

#93
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the state of democracy can be a wide range of various forms and states and just declaring it "hardly democratic anymore" shows very little perspective and really favors the folks you think might be manipulating it....

And that's the difference between theory and practice.

What do you mean?

Re: Certified Translator, stuck in Venezuela, looking for remote freelance work

#94
post #85
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please keep generic ideological battles off HN.

Interesting that dang is making his own political comment here. Notice that when a comment is ostensibly the same tone, but one with that dang agrees with, dang is nowhere to be found. dang, do your bosses know that you're still making political comments on the forums?

I know it feels that way, quite convincingly, but I think it's empirically wrong. I post such replies with boring consistency, and you can't conclude anything from them about what I disagree with. That feeling isn't reliable. It's called the Hostile Media Effect and both sides of every controversy experience it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22...

Re: Certified Translator, stuck in Venezuela, looking for remote freelance work

#95
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.strakertranslations.com/translation-pricing/ - $0.13 - $0.16 per word which comes to $32.50 - $40 per 250-word page. https://gengo.com/pricing-languages/ - $0.06 - $0.12 per word or $15-30 per page. https://www.gts-translation.com/translation-prices-per-word/ - $0.10 per word or $25 per page. https://www.onehourtranslation.com/translation/benefits/tran... - $0.087 or $21.75. It's certainly seems cheaper a…

WOW... no wonder there are so many AI startups working on translation. I thought Google Translate uses AI now fairly perfectly. Why is anyone paying a human translator $40/page when Google Translate is "free"?

Google translates "The IT group" to French as "Le groupe IL". Context matters.

Re: Certified Translator, stuck in Venezuela, looking for remote freelance work

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WOW... no wonder there are so many AI startups working on translation. I thought Google Translate uses AI now fairly perfectly. Why is anyone paying a human translator $40/page when Google Translate is "free"?

Google translates "The IT group" to French as "Le groupe IL". Context matters.

That's good to know!

I haven't really used them for anything serious in the past few years which is why I asked.

I had just read all of this AI stuff recently about Google using machine learning/AI to better help it's instant audio translation service or something.

Perhaps the only thing they machine-learned was the audio to text conversion part? Not the translation part?

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