game tester

associate

participant

machine operator

laboratory technician

Lionbridge

What a displeasure it is working here. Utterly pathetic. I would not recommend working here to my worst enemy. I had a more fulfilling and stimulating job when I was working in a factory.

- I was originally signed up to translate a specific field, and over my 6 or so months working here I have only received one project that actually matched my specialization. Then they complained about my translations not being good enough (of course they weren't, I had little to no experience in the fields I had to translate)

- The typical workday looks like this: You start the day and maybe get a job to do. If you're lucky, you don't get one and you can work on other projects, the day not feeling like torture. If you do get a job, it may be taken by someone else before you even get a chance to check it out.

- There's no difference if you're translating a textbook or a legal text. It's all subpar, PATHETIC USD0.03-0.04 per word. They don't care if you set your acceptable rates when you were first onboarded, you're getting poverty rates no matter what. I was paid more doing second-hand translation at an internship when I was in college. I earned more when I worked one hour daily part-time stocking shelves in a supermarket when I was a teenager with no experience and no education.

- Your translation is expected to be 100% perfect without a single problem. On the first try. Everything under 100% accuracy is considered "failure". So you're getting paid to translate while also being expected to do QA and proofreading, with a deadline that will only give you enough time to translate half the job properly. So you have to cut corners and lay in cold sweat, not knowing if what you did is considered satisfactory.

- The jobs you get are oftentimes mislabeled or not labeled at all. You might receive something called a "translation/proofreading/QA" job, the description saying that it's a translation job, but then turning out to be a proofreading job when you're halfway through and something feels off.

- You're expected to be your own unpaid QA. After you complete the job at well below poverty wage for even in a third world country, they sometimes have the audacity to send you the final product for review. And of course, you're not getting paid for this. It's like their QA team doesn't even exist. The product they send you for review doesn't even have the results of the QA implemented)

- You might sometimes get job assignments in the form of info e-mails for the project manager, leaving you questioning what you are even supposed to do. Or whether you were given a mystery promotion (you weren't. There is absolutely no career advancement to be had here.)

- The ways in which your word count is calculated is cryptic. You could receive a 3000-segment-long job without a translation memory and subpar machine translation and it would only be considered 500 words.

- The onboarding training is completely useless. Sure, you will learn how to install their translation program and learn how to translate a very basic and rudimentary file, but the actual jobs you get are a completely different story. It's like being taught how to ride a kiddy bike and then being expected to drive a tank.

- Management is laughable. They routinely forget to send you valuable information and forget to give you access to tools you're required to use if you're hoping to conform to their ridiculous standards. At least they're sometimes quick to respond. But then again, when you ask them about your ridiculously low rates, they ignore you. 

-Their CAT software is a joke. If you want to use the hotkeys, you have to perform a finger-breaking ballet dance on your keyboard (you can change them, but it's buried in submenus. The hotkey-changing dialog doesn't even have a search function, and the hotkeys are not sorted alphabetically). The "remember my choice" fields NEVER work, so every time you're doing a search, it asks you at least once if you want to confirm your addition to a segment (even if all you did was merely open it and didn't change anything). You're only shown one translation memory match at a time and there’s no way to cycle through them (compared to unlimited hits in, let's say, Trados Studio). Concordance search does not allow you to jump to the match. It doesn't even check spelling on-the-go. You need to generate a report using another software of theirs, which will then tell you that you've made a mistake, and even tell you in which file. But not the segment number itself, so you have to use the unusable search function and then spend up to an hour fixing false positives. 

- Their "QA" software (which isn't even good at checking quality. Its only job is to throw rows upon rows of false positives at you. Did I mention I was only paid for translation, but was expected to do unpaid QA and proofreading, too?) is completely broken on high-DPI screens. On my 4K 13-inch laptop screen, it's about 7x7 centimeters large and each line of text is about 0.3 millimeters. 

- I did multiple jobs that straight-up were not even registered for payment. When I asked management about this, I received no response. So they still owe me about USD100 in unpaid jobs. Plus more in overdue invoices.

I wish I never even started working here. When I joined, even with multiple years of previous experience, I loved translation. Now I'm thinking about going back to working at that factory and never translating anything again.

At the start I was asked to do the same meeting/presentations over and over again.  This was a waste of time since they had already sent and I had reviewed the powerpoint presentation which each meeting/presentation just went over partly again.  Some of the presented judgements are contradictory and you are expected to second guess (sometimes) what they want and these are often not obvious.  There is also a number of "exams" which are judged so if you are too slow or don't get their answers you will be dropped.

In the Production system I was asked to do tasks/queries which were boring and repetitive (even to the extent of repeating the same queries in the same order over again up to 10 times).  There does not seem to be a simple sort routine in the selection of the repetitive tasks to exclude these from the list.

No feedback from management or leaders at all - I sent about 10 or more emails to them and received 2 very curt replies a few days later.
They supply no names or contact details for team leaders which in any organization I have been in this has been basic.  Random people would contact you via email to do a particular task and there was usually no response back if you contacted them.  This lead to a feeling of great confidence in what you were doing and if ultimately you would be paid.

The work is irregular - they will offer you 10 hours and then want 30 hours out of you a few days later to be completed that week.  The following week there will be nothing.  Tasks don't come in until later in the week (if at all) and then they expect you to complete them by Sunday.  If you don't they will threaten to drop you from the programme - bullying.  

There is no expectation that you will need a break from staring/sitting at a screen for hours - and you can't do that - and the break you take (sometimes for sanity) is in your own time since you are not judging. Each judgement will be given a maximum of 2 minutes but fall below the rate of judging and they will drop you from the programme.   So all up for 20 hours you may expend 40 hours of just needing a break and also unpaid training (so factor that into the "wage" they may offer you.  If you are in a "real" office this is all part of the job and you are paid accordingly.

They will give you mandatory "webinars" to attend (these seem to be pre-recorded since you can only listen in) so these should just be a download rather than having to listen in at a certain (inconvenient) time.  They also expect you to do many hours of unpaid "training".  You will need to usually run IE10 and a number of other products on your PC.

Lionbridge don't pay you - so I consider them to be a SCAM - the pay is poor for the level of qualifications they expect you to have and the pay period is paid 2 months later if they bother to send it at all.  You will also need to cover the cost of your internet and your PC/electricity.
You will also lose in the many foreign currency exchanges getting the money into your account.

The company seems to be based in Ireland - so this is probably a tax scam from the US Govt since you will be paid (if you get it) in US$ when otherwise it should have been in Euro.

The biggest problem I have with these people is that they provide almost no training. They give you a pdf of guidelines (that is a pain to search through). They also have training you can do on the website, but you are limited in how much you can do at one time, which just leads to making more mistakes than you would if you could practice more, it's so stupid. But at least the website will tell you what you got wrong and why you got it wrong. They have these secret rating ads placed throughout your daily workload, but they don't tell you when you've done one, or when you get one wrong. Ensuring that you can just continue getting that type of rating wrong until you next go through training or browse through the poorly formatted pdf to find out that you are doing it wrong. They've made it way harder than it has to be to understand the convoluted system they use to rate these ads. You'll find yourself spending a lot of time (unpaid time btw) going over the pdf and doing training just trying to understand it.

Another frustrating thing; rating these ads that nobody in their right mind would click on as excellent. Let's face it, nobody consciously clicks on these anyway, but results from some search engine nobody has ever heard of with all kinds of errors in the text will get rated as excellent. Like you are driving down the street looking for a taco bell so you pull into the parking lot of a dilapidated building called 'burrito gong' because the sign outside says "Information on gordita cruchn here! Get free cruchn here!" despite there being a taco bell right across the street. Nobody is going to do that! Ever!

At the end of all their emails they sound very supportive and say things like "we're here to help, contact us at any time if you have a problem". I've had numerous problems and not once have I received a word back from them. I recently had to retake a test and they gave me less than 20 hours to see the email and take the test. 

The least you could do, if you are not going to pay people for their time spent training, is make training accessible to them if they want it. I have the feeling that a lot of people get fired from here because they are making mistakes that they don't know they are making. That just seems like a really stupid problem to have. So far Lionbridge appears incompetent in their management and also doesn't appear to care very much about it.

Having said all that, you can work from home and you can work whenever you want, but it certainly isn't all sunshine and rainbows. The pay isn't that great, but I didn't really expect it to be for a part time work from home job. It is more complicated and difficult than I thought it would be, attention to detail is absolutely necessary, but I think Lionbridge could help themselves out a lot by ensuring people can understand what they are supposed to be doing instead of just throwing people out the door of a moving car and watching calmly in the rear view mirror to see if they've survived or not.

The pay is not bad for pretty tedious work-from-home tasks. 
Unfortunately, communication is non-existent. It is only possible to contact anyone via email, and despite the fact that they constantly suggest that workers "email with any questions", you will NEVER get a response. Of the many emails I have sent asking for clarification or logistic information, I have yet to receive a response. I once accidentally received a response to a question I had emailed in the form of a canned mass email, which explained a recent system glitch, and which I would have received anyway.

There is no initial training, only a long PDF of guidelines, which do not always provide clear rating criteria, - primarily examples without adequate explanation of the rating. You get canned feedback, which basically says that you need to agree with the ratings a "senior" rater already assigned to the task. Some ratings are subjective, and I have frequently disagreed with the feedback of the "senior" raters based entirely upon Lionbridge's own criteria; however, you will get nothing from disagreeing, or, naturally, even a response to questions about why specifically your rating failed. You are expected to figure it out by reading the sometimes unclear and inconsistent ratings of someone else.   Furthermore, they threaten to suspend your account if you do not meet a certain rating percentage, which, again, is based on matching the ratings of a "senior" rater. It is an entirely fear-based work culture. 

The maximum you can work per week is 20 hours, with no more than 8 hours per day, so it's good for supplemental income. It is easy to get the full 20 hours, as there are, currently, always available tasks. You are paid bi-weekly.
Mandatory trainings, rating reviews, and webinars are all paid. You are enrolled in a 401K, and those are the only benefits to which you have access, which is to be expected as a part-time, contract employee. 

Your hours, however, must match the average time allotted for each task. Because most tasks require that page content be checked/read, as well as all links, in order to do most tasks properly, the average allotted time is insufficient. You will also come across some new tasks for which you need to read all of the instructions and examples; you do not get paid for this. You will find that you are often spending more time working than you will be paid for. Some tasks, on the other hand require much less time than the average (I'm baffled as to who is determining these average times), but I haven't yet confirmed if the time balances out. Your timesheet must agree with the overall average task time, regardless of how long you actually spent sitting in front of the computer. 

Has the potential to bea good gig, but it seriously falls short.

The job title linguist also can include  work from transcription or other random tasks that you get contacted for by people you do not know and who normally don't sufficiently identity themselves via email.

I am mainly writing this review because the communication here is pure trash and I think it is something in their work culture as being the reason.

I started off doing transcription and there was some decent communication at first. Abruptly, I guess the task may have ran out and you would never get any reason as to why or if you should be on standby for the project leads or whatever the title was in the email.

Then randomly someone from India location begins contact you about tasks. And the communication is just as poor. You really don't have any idea where they got your email and they pass you around to different projects never really telling you when it will end. You know it has ended when you don't hear any contact from them again. And then someone else you don't know will pop up in your email again with a random usually very temporary job.

The tasks normally have instructions that aren't clear. And then there is random QA which isn't really consistent or even trustworthy because all of the above I mentioned.

You really do not have any idea if you are treating fairly or not because these people hide behind random emails. I had an interaction with the I am still questioning. This person contacts me outside of work hours quick job via email trying to almost talk me out of doing this random project and how it was okay if I didn't do it out of the blue. Something I never experienced before from a job or a work at home job. It really didn't sit well and I actually went to see if I could find some contact information for corporate because I suspect there was a reason whey they sent it.

Some project leads will disappear an do not answer your questions about if a job ended. And then you'll see them on another task so it is not like they left they just choose to stonewall you. There seems to me little accountability as to what is proper and professional when communicating with people.

This company also sent an email about standing for justice and all the rest like many others do these days. But I actually question how diverse this company actually is in certain locations. And it's important because you don't want to have interact with people who have certain biases or don't value your time no matter what background, age, race, etc. you are. And that seems to be an issue here with how they communicate with people. 

But I will any, most communication done via the FreshDesk platform is professional and timely. One reason is that it creates tickets and you can clearly see someone is going to answer you and not ignore you. Too bad they don't have something like that for their work at home workers as a standard. 


I worked for Lionbridge for a year in 2015 as an "Internet Assessor". This is a telecommute position where you work from home. The position basically entails looking at a google search query (for example, the query could be "chocolate chip cookie recipes"), and then two sets of google search results. You then have roughly 5 - 7 minutes to decide which set of search results is better. This sounds simple in theory, however the way you decide which set of results is better is based off of a large set of rules in a manual they'll send you in .pdf format. There's a ton of rules you have to memorize and to top it off, they are constantly updating the rules, so you'll have to remember to unlearn old rules.

Even though you work from home, this is a very stressful job. Every two weeks (it might of been every week, I can't remember since it's been a while), you and your co-workers will attend an online webinar in a large chatroom where you'll get the results of your work through e-mail and they will tell you the "right" answers of which results sides should have been marked as better, much the way a teacher reads the correct answers of an exam aloud after you get them back. The stressful part is, if you get too many wrong answers, you get put under review and eventually fired. 

It's also stressful because the search queries aren't always simple as "chocolate chip cookie recipes" or "Lady Gaga", you'll sometimes end up with very difficult queries that will require you to do research (google, Wikipedia, WebMD, etc.,). Keep in mind that you'll be doing this under a time limit.

Lastly, I would say the pay for the job is a bit unfair because you have to study a manual of rules if you want to have any chance of not getting put under review (and probably fired). You don't get paid while studying the manual. You have to do it in your own time.

As for the hours, you have to do 20 hours a week. If you're good at the job, I think they'll let you go over that maximum. You also get to set your own hours pretty much.

All in all, I would say this is a decent gig if you have a breadth of knowledge in many different subjects and you only want/need 20 hours of work a week. However, I wouldn't recommend it for a college student because you have enough stuff to study already.

If my review is in someway making you have second thoughts about applying, just apply. Depending on how you list it on your resume, this job is a nice stepping stone towards getting a desk job in an office, whether it be Data Entry or IT. You can make it sound really impressive to interviewers.

I was suppose to be a map analyst, but they had me branching out to rate lots of other tasks unrelated to maps.  For each new task type, you have to read long pdf files to learn.  I was not good at the other tasks they tried to give me. I was the best at being the map analyst that I was hired to be. (They grade your work regularly, which can be unpleasant.)  There was no way to just narrow yourself to the types of tasks that you're originally hired for. You were forced to do the other types of tasks they gave you.  They put new tasks up and if you had not read the 50-plus page pdfs on those new tasks, you were going to get them wrong and be graded accordingly.  If you did not submit enough  tasks in the week, they sent out what I could only describe as moderately aggressively worded emails about how you were not making enough hours. They would aggressively push you to rate more and more tasks even if you were not good at the types of they kept putting up, and were technically not the tasks types you were hired for.  When first starting with Lionbridge, my impression was that training was temporary and would be finished and done with at some point, so I was ok with the unpaid training.  But training is constant and always unpaid.  The hours spend reading all the long training PDFs do not get counted towards the hours you spent on the program for the week. If you spent the alloted 4 hours you had planned for yourself for the day to read a pdf and then your child woke up before you could have a chance to rate anything, to them it looked as though you had not spent any time on the program for that day.  This was constant as they were always introducing new types of tasks and new training pdfs for you to read before you could proceed with rating. 
I offered them my termination notice as I had intended to go to the end of the month for the last month I was working there, so  I could receive my last paycheck for a full month.  However they turned off my access to the program the following day and would not allow me to work my notice out. Whatever good thoughts I still had about this company soured at that point.
If you're ok with all of this fast paced unpaid training involving reading many MANY pages of dry pdfs and aggressive email tactics to get you to up your hours, it is otherwise a pretty relaxed place to work.  Sometimes I miss it.  But ultimately, I have much more time for my family working a different type of subcontracting work at this point.

I'll describe my experience here, but in case you don't want to read my [probably excessively long] tale, let's lead with the thing I most want to share: YOU WILL NOT MAKE THE HOURLY WAGE THEY SAY YOU WILL. You are given time limits within which you are expected to finish each task. You are expected to do A LOT with each one, and they very rarely give you enough time to perform every check and piece of research they expect you to do. If you stay within the time restraint and submit results that displease them, you will be reprimanded and your job threatened. If you exceed the time restraint, submit results they deem acceptable, and report the time you actually spent, you will be reprimanded and your job threatened. I ended up spending the time I needed but only reported the time I was supposed to spend. I got paid for somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of the hours I spent working for this company because I so drastically under-reported my time in order to retain the job because I needed whatever income I could get. 

Ultimately (and ironically), they accused me of reporting time I hadn't worked, which was absolutely false. Their software had glitched while I was doing required training. I had immediately sent an email reporting the software problem and requesting advice. I never received a response, so I reported the time I worked. I subsequently received a very unpleasant email in which they basically accused me of being a thief, threatened me, and demanded an explanation--much like the explanation I had ALREADY SENT. As I had tried to get help for the issue through the appropriate channels, and as I had worked hours upon hours for which I never got paid over the preceding 18 months, and as I take significant issue with being called a liar and a thief, this was the final, gigantic, ugly straw. I provided the requested explanation, forwarded my initial email about the glitch, and resigned. They did acknowledge at that point that "upon review," they could see that I had, indeed, worked the hours I reported. There was no apology for accusing me of thievery. They did suggest I reconsider my resignation and stay on with them. I did not.

So that was my experience; do with it what you will. Whatever you do moving forward, good luck to you!

Skip this one. Its a quagmire. Company willing to take shortcuts and forgo real role up your sleeves engineering analysis. Trivializes efforts. Bad mindset, willingness to overlook actual, helpful engineering analyses. Yup, just get the job done. If the client wants updates, they'll contract for more work. Kind of a disservice for the client, and professionalism.
Could be a good company. Work is genuine and good, if you can separate it from staff and management. Major efforts supports JSF. Work not hard, if you do it on your own. Unknown if client really wants LSAR backing into Tech Pubs, or at least a certain amount of engineering. You'll have to figure that one on your own. It just might be that there's too much to overcome, even if very knowledgeable. Teaching both engineering and LSAR/Logistics is almost insurmountable. Management would have to be hands-off, letting you do the job. 

Good intentioned people and eager, but you can't get there from here. Third Tier Employer for Logistics & LSAR. Young staff, untrained, short on engineering experience which makes training more than a challenge. Local management ignoring that not helpful, they listen, but don't. They think they know the effort, but things fall short when trying to explain inherent database difficulties and trainees have to be willing to do they heavy lifting, studying, working on examples. and eagerness isn't a substitute for mechanical & electronics  
Company has Logistics staff at sister location. Some help, but they too won't get involved with overbearing local upper manager. One down the road on mediocrity, hard to turn back. Good intentioned, but forgetful of roots as Vets
Upper manager in Indy is a tough cookie, somehow well meaning. Some sister company management knowledgeable of LSAR, but micromanages efforts.

I applied and went through the unpaid hoops, training and testing to be approved to work with Lionbridge. I was not concerned about that, since I really just wanted something I could do from home that would supplement my income.

After getting onboarded and taking all the tests, Lionbridge lets you basically sign in whenever and if there is work, you work. Assignments lasted between 40 seconds and about ten minutes for the most part. You have to grab *each* assignment before anyone else does, and you cannot queue them.

What this ends up looking like is I would get home from my morning errands, sign on, then wait. And wait, wait, wait. Refresh and maybe get a couple of minutes of work.

There was never consistent work for the 8 months I was with the company. The most I got done in a day was an hour and forty minutes before work ran out. I signed up to get emails any time there was work, and even with that, there was not enough to do.

This may vary by region. I know a lot of regional stuff gets filtered to people who are in that same region. I'm in the Pacific Northwest and the idea of fifteen an hour is great until you realize you wont even get an hour per day.

Communication was awful. Just an occasional "you need to sign in and work" email (I would if I could, LB) and not much else. Getting through to anyone is pretty difficult by design. They don't want to talk to the SEEs.

If you know about mturk, its super similar in the work you do, the availablility of work, and the way that work gets gobbled up the second it becomes available. At least with that you can queue work and have a couple hours if you hit it just right. Here, you cannot.

If it was offering the minimum 10 hours a week as guaranteed work (sign in and 10 hrs is there for you) it would be great. But the unpaid training, plus the wait times between assignments, the fact that you only get paid for completed assignments (not wait time), and the lack of communication make this place something I would only approach as a last resort.

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