Evaluation is about building up a picture of each editor so we can determine their suitability to work with Unbabel. To ensure high-quality translations for our clients, we have to be certain that every editor is producing the excellent quality of work we ask for.
This means that every editor has to be assigned an evaluation score, which is an average of your rating across the set of tasks that have most recently been evaluated (usually five per set). For example, if you receive 3, 3, 3, 4, 4 in your evaluation results, your rating will be set at 3.4 until your next evaluation.
We have to set minimum standards for entry into the community of editors who work on paid tasks so that we produce excellent translations, but we also use this to determine the extent to which editors get tasks in their dashboard.
We have a system in place to ensure that tasks are distributed appropriately according to content type (emails, FAQs, other texts etc.) and deadline. This is because some of our tasks have to be delivered in less than thirty minutes, and some others can take up to 24 hours, so sending everything to everyone at the same priority level all the time wouldn’t be a good way to meet our targets.
In practice, this may mean that certain editors with the very highest ratings per language pair tend to see tasks first, but the period that elapses between the task being released and it being available to everyone can be no more than a few seconds. This depends mainly on the content type and deadline for the customer in question, as mentioned above.
If you’re concerned that having a lower rating has lessened your access to paid tasks, this is possible - however it’s much more likely that your evaluation has coincided with a fluctuation in workload for the whole community.