WELCOME to babelport.com in its early days!

Why babelport.com and what's the deal with this ugly logo? This word-creation derives from two concepts. First there was the ancient Biblical Tower of Babel, a place where people of all nations met and communicated. Words, still in use like the English verb to babble or the German brabbeln, stem from this origin. Secondly, the noun port can be understood as either a maritime port or as a portal, a huge doorway. You may choose. Either concept fits quite well into our own understanding of what babelport.com shall become. We want babelport.com to become a busy meeting and market place for the communication, or better translation, industry.

As we took the Tower of Babel to be one of the concepts representing this online meeting place for translators, we were spending weeks looking for a not-to-much-afar logo — but we didn't come up with one. Then, already at the edge of dropping this whole idea, one of us looked out of the window! What we saw was the Monument of the Battle of Nations, the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, commemorating the Battle between Napoleonic Troops and the Prussian and Russian Allies of 1813. So we figured: “This thing is huge, monstrous, old, and it still stands!“. And it somehow resembled the Tower of Babel, too. So we decided to take the silhouette of Leipzig, as we see it when looking out of our windows, to become our logo. Today, we love it. So don’t say it’s ugly!

After having spent months programming page after page of code and thinking about helpful features that could be included into babelport.com the site is finally ready to be tested by you. We hope that babelport.com can introduce to you informative resources, helpful members and new clients. However, since this site just launched not all the features we wanted to provide have been implemented yet. But we are working on constantly improving babelport.com to establish a long-term meeting place for translators, interpreters and other language professionals and their clients.

It is our foremost aim to build a friendly and supportive community – together with you! By joining babelport.com as a member you get the chance to contribute to this community of language experts and in turn gain from the input of other members. Translation agencies and direct clients are of course also welcomed and asked to participate in making this site a well-established meeting place for its members.
At the moment babelport.com offers the following services:

• Members can create their own Profiles.
• Posting of and Bidding on Projects.
• Search for agencies or freelancers.
• Forums and Discussion boards.
• Freelance and Agency Rating System to provide more transparency and trust in the industry.
• TransHelper questions - A service where translators help translators translating.
• The Babelport Glossary already contains more than 1000 entries for your reference.
• A Price Calculator lets you conveniently calculate your personal rates.
• The Unit Converter automatically converts different units of measure.
• Articles and News that you should check out.

Should you have any suggestions about further features that might improve the service provided by babelport.com please feel free to contact Chris, the SiteFounder, or post a thread in our Suggestions Forum. In case you have problems accessing some of this site’s features please report them here.

UPDATE: The babelport.com webservice is currently under construction and will be relaunched in some time in June. The SiteFounder, therefore extends the special sign-up offer which includes a three month PREMIUM membership for free until the relaunch of this service. Everybody who registers with babelport.com before the relaunch of the service (sometime in June 2005) will be granted a PREMIUM Membership up to three months automatically.

The SiteFounder & the site team