Appen is an award-winning language technology solutions and consulting company. Many independent contractors in this firm are fluent in one or more of the 120 dialects and languages.
Its services include transcription, data annotation, search engine evaluation, data collection, linguistic consulting and social media evaluation,. Appen is in partnership with many technology and e-commerce companies to help them expand into new markets.
Types of Work-from-Home Opportunities
Appen offers its existing employees the option to work from home or any location all over the globe. That said, there is a number of freelancers’ positions that are home-based, including:
- Crowdsourcing projects
- Transcription
- Search evaluation
- Data annotation
- Social media evaluation
- Localization
- Translation
- Sourcing
Search engine evaluation tasks require up to 5 hours daily availability from Monday till Friday. Web search evaluators are asked to go through a qualification process involving the completion of a review and study of certain guidelines and a series of quizzes. The process ranges from 25 to 40 hours of commitment over a period of three weeks. The training is not paid for.
Appen also offers some Crowdsourcing, a term used to describe its micro jobs. These are online tasks which require no training and can be completed in a short period of time. Such tasks offer additional income but do not expect much from them. The company however claims top performers can make up to $25 per hour.
Applying for Work
To be able to see current job opportunities in your local, go to the Appen Opportunities page at the Appen website, and type in your country to narrow your search. You will have to sign up first to be able to apply for the projects that fit your profile and local. Once you apply, the staffing team will reach out to you to complete a qualification phase.
Also you may be contacted for projects you have not applied for yet or do not show up in your homepage, simply because the recruiting team finds your profile to be a good fit for a certain project.
Qualifications
Qualifications differ from one job to another. Apart from translation tasks which require a college degree, most other task do not.
To join a search evaluation job, you must be a native or near native speaker of the target language. In general, all language-oriented tasks necessitate some tests of your linguistic abilities.
Here are some examples of the dialects and languages Appen works in:
Arabic with all its dialects, Bulgarian, Basque, Bakhtiari, Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia, Czech Cantonese, Croatian, Catalan, Dutch, Dari, Danish, Estonian, English, French, Finnish, Farsi, Gujarati, Greek, German, Gallego, Hungarian, Hindi, Hebrew, Haitian Creole, Italian, Icelandic, Japanese, Kurdish Sorani, Kermanji, Korean, Kazakh Kannada, Luri, Lithuanian, Latvian, Laki, Mazanderani, Mandarin, Malagasy, Marathi, Malayalam, Oriya, Portuguese, Polish, Pashto, Russian, Romanian, Swedish, Spanish, Somali, Slovenian, Slovak, Serbian, Turkish, Thai, Telugu, Tamil, Tagalog, Wu and Xiang, Vietnamese, Urdu, Ukrainian.
More likely Appen will keep adding more dialects and languages, so it’s preferable to keep an eye on their website.
Remote Technical Requirements
If you want to work at home as an independent contractor with Appen, you should make sure you possess a computer that is less than 3 years old, a high-speed Internet and an antivirus software. You must have a Microsoft Windows Vista or newer or Mac OS operating system installed as well. Tablets are not allowed. There are some projects that require a headset with a microphone using VOIP. So be prepared!
Pay and Benefits
Independent contracting jobs such as translators, data annotators and search evaluators are usually paid an hourly rate. On the other hand, Crowdsourcing projects are paid at a rate per hit. Payments of a $50 minimum are made on a bimonthly basis.
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