Option A will have no great effect on the translation market - it is too vast.
Although you may have no great esteem for the quality of the Kudoz glossary (with which I agree to a very considerable extent) this site imposes a certain meritocracy. So, if you mainly depend on this site for clients, you need a good ranking in order to be spotted by them. That is the catch.
I also practise what you said about taking care of your own environment. I do not skimp on investing in good reference sources.
Marcelo Silveyra wrote:
What I want to know is what you think about the following issues:
A) I don't want someone to use my experience, hard work, and expertise so that, in a few years, they can claim to have done tons of translation work in several fields in their resume without actually having done the hard part (and maybe without having become a good translator in the process). This is a completely selfish thought, both personally and collectively (regarding translation professionals) - I'm not going to offer my help to someone who will later become unqualified competition that can claim to have the appropriate qualifications. Ok, so life's not fair, but I don't have to make it even less so.
B) On the other hand, if I don't answer this person's questions (although I'm sure someone else will), people who could use the glossaries in the future (maybe including myself at some point) won't have access to an answer they could have consulted otherwise.
So far, I've chosen A). While the glossaries can be a good resource, I personally believe that taking care of my own work environment is more important, both for me and for the colleagues whom I respect. I've also applied A) to people who obviously choose wrong answers to their questions because they were too lazy to read explanations and simply chose the first thing they saw (you can usually tell when it happens). Now, my question is: what do you think? A or B? Or perhaps an unforeseen C?
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