A recruiter emailed me last week with "urgent Turkmen project, please complete onboarding." I filled in the portal. Uploaded my CV, my degree, a scan of my passport, tax residency details, signed a nine-page NDA. Did an unpaid sample. That was eleven days ago. No project has materialized. It probably never existed as anything more than a line item on someone's vendor-coverage spreadsheet.
This is the part of agency work nobody prices. The onboarding tax. It's the hours you spend proving you exist before a single word of paid work changes hands, and for a single-vendor language like Turkmen, you pay it constantly — because every agency on earth wants a name in the Turkmen box, and most of them will never send you anything.
What's fair, and what's just filing
Some of it is legitimate. An NDA is fine; I sign dozens a year. Payment details, tax forms, a W-8BEN or the local equivalent — fair enough, they can't pay me otherwise. A rate sheet, obviously. That's the actual business of setting up a vendor.
The rest is filing dressed up as diligence. The portals are the worst offenders. Every mid-size LSP has bought or built its own vendor management system, and each one demands the same information in a slightly different shape. Upload your CV. Now also type your work history into these fields, because the CV apparently doesn't count. Select your language pairs from a dropdown that lists "Turkmen" once and "Turkmen (Turkmenistan)" once and makes you guess which one routes to actual projects. Rate the proficiency in your own native language on a scale of one to five. I always want to answer that one honestly: I'm a native speaker, there is no five, the scale is for you, not me.
Here's my rule now. I'll give an agency roughly forty-five minutes of setup on spec. NDA, basic profile, rates. That's the cost of doing business and I don't complain about it. Beyond forty-five minutes, I want a reason to believe there's real work — a named project, a PO, a PM who can tell me what the content actually is. "Building our roster" is not a reason. It's a filing cabinet, and I don't work for filing cabinets for free.
The unpaid test problem
The sample translation is where I get genuinely stubborn. For high-resource pairs a 250-word test is a minor annoyance. For Turkmen it's a trap, and here's why: there's almost nobody qualified to evaluate it.
Think it through. The agency doesn't have a staff Turkmen reviewer — if they did, they wouldn't need to onboard me. So my test gets sent to another freelance Turkmen translator, a competitor, for assessment. Or it gets run through an automated QA tool that flags my correct agglutinative morphology as "inconsistent terminology." Or, increasingly, someone pastes it next to machine output and eyeballs whether they "look similar," which rewards fluent-and-wrong over accurate-and-different. None of those is a real evaluation. I've failed tests where I know the reference translation was worse than mine, because the reviewer preferred a calque of the English that read smoother to someone not paying attention.
So I've moved to a simple position. I don't do unpaid tests over 200 words. Under that, I'll consider it if the agency tells me who's grading it and against what. If they can name a Turkmen reviewer and a rubric, great — that's an agency that actually cares about quality. If they can't, the test is theater, and a failed theater performance can quietly blacklist you in a database you'll never see. Better to skip it.
Paid tests I'll always do. A short paid sample at my normal rate solves everyone's problem. It tells them what my work looks like and it tells me they're willing to spend money to find out, which is the only signal that actually predicts whether they'll send real projects. The agencies that balk at paying for a 150-word sample are the same ones that later fight you on a 30-day payment term.
Payment terms are the real audition
The onboarding form asks a hundred questions about me. It rarely tells me anything about them, and the one thing I want to know is buried or absent: when do you pay, and how.
Ask it up front. Net 30 from invoice is normal. Net 60 exists and I tolerate it from clients with volume. "End of month following the month of the completed PO" is a phrase designed to mean net 60 while sounding like net 30 — read it twice. Some portals now route payment through a third platform that skims a fee for the privilege of paying me my own money. I want to know all of this before I've committed, not after I've delivered and I'm chasing an accounts email in a timezone eight hours off mine from Dubai.
My quiet metric for a new agency: how long between my questions and a straight answer. An agency that responds to "what are your payment terms" with a clear "net 45, bank transfer, no platform fee" within the hour is an agency I'll clear my calendar for. One that takes four days and cc's three people is showing me exactly how the invoice chase will go.
The forms measure whether I'm worth trusting. Nobody builds the form that measures whether they are. So I built mine, and it's short: pay on time, name your reviewer, and don't make me audition for work that doesn't exist yet.