Freelancer glossary
The words you will meet on vendor and project pages, explained in plain language.
Vendor
A company or platform that offers projects or freelance work.
OneForma and Welocalize are examples of companies that run such projects.
Project
A specific piece of work a vendor runs, with its own rules, language and pay.
One vendor may run a search-rating project and a voice-recording project at the same time.
Client
The business whose work is finally being done — often a vendor arranges the freelancers for them.
A search company may be the client, while a vendor manages the freelancers.
Qualification
A step you complete before a project lets you start real work. Usually a test or a set of sample tasks.
You may need to pass a short exam before the project opens for you.
Assessment
The test itself — questions or sample tasks used to check whether you understood the rules.
An assessment might ask you to rate ten sample search results.
Onboarding
The setup steps after you are accepted — creating your account, adding details, reading the rules.
Onboarding usually includes profile setup and reading the project guideline.
Locale
A language plus a country. Projects often need a specific combination, not just a language.
Hindi (India) is a different locale from Hindi spoken outside India.
Task Type
The kind of work inside a project — for example rating, transcribing, recording or labelling.
One project may have both audio recording and text labelling task types.
Guideline
The official rulebook for a project. Your work is judged against it, so it is worth reading slowly.
If the guideline and your instinct disagree, the guideline wins.
Calibration
A check where your answers are compared with the correct ones, so everyone judges work the same way.
A calibration task shows where your rating differs from the expected rating.
Requalification
Taking the qualification again — usually after a long gap or when the rules change.
A project may ask for requalification when the guideline is updated.
Payout
The payment sent to you for completed work, on the vendor’s own schedule.
Some vendors pay weekly, others monthly, after the work is approved.
Hourly Rate
How much a project pays for one hour of work, before fees, conversion and taxes.
An hourly rate is not a salary — hours available can change week to week.
KYC
Identity verification a platform does before paying you. Share documents only on the vendor’s official site.
KYC usually means uploading an ID document to the vendor’s own portal.
Independent Contractor
You work for yourself, not as an employee. No fixed salary, and taxes are your responsibility.
Most remote AI projects hire freelancers as independent contractors, not staff.
Crowdsourcing Platform
A website where large work is split into small tasks and shared with many freelancers.
Thousands of people may work on the same project from different countries.
Reviewer
A person who checks submitted work against the guideline and gives feedback or a score.
A reviewer may return your task with a note about what to correct.
Quality Score
A rating of how closely your work follows the guideline. It affects how much work you are offered.
A low score may reduce available tasks until it improves.
Deadline
The time by which a task must be submitted. Missing it can cancel the task.
Some tasks expire within hours of being accepted.
Production Task
Real paid work, as opposed to a practice or test task.
After qualifying, the tasks you complete are production tasks.
Guidance
Help understanding a project, its rules and its process. It is teaching, not a promise of work.
Guidance can explain a guideline, but the vendor still decides who works.
Verification
Confirming that a website, message or payment request is genuinely from the vendor.
Always check the official domain before entering any personal detail.