How long is the waitlist for Unbabel?

If you're reading this article, you've probably thinking about signing up for Unbabel, if you haven't done so already. That's great news, and we're looking forward to getting in touch with you soon.

We're on a mission to provide good jobs to as many editors across the world as possible on our journey towards becoming the world's translation layer. However, this doesn't mean we can operate outside of very basic market rules regarding supply and demand. It's our job in Community to ensure that everyone has the right amount of work and they complete it to a high quality, as well as on time.

If we have too many editors in a community, there will be too few tasks and existing editors who have been working with us for a very long time will end up with an amount of tasks that is low and unfair. Meanwhile, if we have too few editors in a community, the editors we have will be overworked and our customers will be disappointed. That's why we try to make sure there's always just the right amount of editors in a community.

Essentially, we will only contact people who signed up while a language pair was closed when we need to increase the number of publishers in our community. This can take weeks, months or even years.

Some languages have not needed new editors for several years and may not need them for several more. This is because of the nature of on-demand translation: if we don't have a customer requiring work, we can't offer it to new editors. If we welcomed new editors to the platform without adequate volumes of work, it would be a poor use of our time and yours as there would be no work to make it worth completing the sign-up process.

However, we often see last-minute cases where we suddenly have an acute need for new editors in many different language pairs, so it is important to register your demand on the website so we can get in contact with you if this happens. The next time there is availability, one of our community managers will reach out to you to let you know how to proceed.

Important: please don't register on the waitlist for languages that you don't speak. We don't allow switches between languages later on.