[byrneseyeview]

It sounds like this is really exaggerating. LinkedIn accounts ain't cheap, and they do give you ways to contact other professionals. If you could ping someone and say "I'm interested in doing some translation; for an example of my work, check out the official Romanian version of LinkedIn," that would be great. Simply being able to say that you contributed to a site used by the person you're talking to is a great way to start a conversation that ends with them writing a check.

[Vivtek]

Speaking as a professional translator, I have to agree. But I'm also speaking as an open-source developer, so I'm used to that model, and the translation industry isn't. It sounds to me as though LinkedIn could have approached the matter with some tact, but it should be said that translators as a whole are pretty prickly. We have to be. The better we are, the less visible we become.

And it's a common scam in the industry (less so now that we congregate online) to take a document, break it up into chunks, then send each chunk to a freelancer as a "translation test" to be done free of charge. I think this LinkedIn thing hit some people that way.

But yeah; mostly, this is one of those sound and fury things.

[kragen]

What would be a reasonable alternative to that kind of translation test? The first thing that came to my mind was critiquing somebody else's translation, but that has the same problem.