Tweeting for Translators

For translators, Twitter is a great place to increase your online presence, introduce yourself, chat with others in the profession, search for jobs, hook up with clients, and get near-instant help with terminology queries. I've seen plenty of job offers, translation offers, and terminology questions and immediate answers being tweeted on any given day to know it's worth the trouble.

In response to a recent discussion of how to include your twitter contact information on ProZ.com, I put an html Twitter updates badge in the "About me" section of my ProZ.com profile, and it seemed to work out pretty well. For those who'd like to do the same, here's how:

First of all, if you don't have a Twitter account, sign up now at http://twitter.com. You can start by following me and all your translation colleagues in the Translation Twibe, which is growing daily, and also check out @allfreelancejob, @hotfreelance, @translationjobs, for a few.

Now, if you have a ProZ account and want to tell viewers you're tweeting on Twitter, you need to get what's called a 'badge', which is just the html code that displays your twitter info . Start by going to http://twitter.com/badges, and click on Other and then on Continue. Then click the radio button for HTML widget (I tried the Flash widget, and it works, but it's slow and the links don't seem to work), and click Continue again. Select the number of updates you want to display and whether or not you want a title (I just left the defaults; they look fine), then copy the code that appears in the little box.

So, you've got the badge, and now you need to put this in your ProZ profile. Go to your profile and scroll all the way down to the "About me" section near the bottom. Click on Edit, and then paste the code that you copied for the Twitter badge into the edit box. I just put it down at the end of my "About me" information and it seems to look fine there. Click Save and update profile, and you're done! Now when people view your profile on ProZ.com, they'll see your most recent tweets and a link to follow you on Twitter.

Update: Since I've had a few questions about where to find the "About me" section on a ProZ profile, here's a screenshot from my own profile with the "About me" section circled:

Optional: the only change I made to the html code for the Twitter badge was to change text-align:right on the fourth line of the code to text-align:left. This puts the "follow me on twitter" link on the left side of your profile where I think it's more likely to be seen and understood.

There you go, welcome to the future, and don't forget to follow me on twitter, too! :)