Cooperative Member Services

We are a cooperative of language service professionals. We fundamentally believe that in sharing our knowledge, expertise, and our resources with one other, we not only help each other as individuals, but we grow in strength as a cooperative. All of our language teachers, translators, ELT authors, and proofreaders contribute their share, and consequently each member benefits many times over.

To find out more about the philosophy behind SLB partner services, please read our blog post: Services for Cooperative Associates.

If you would like to know more about any of these services, please get in touch with the SLB team — we’d love to hear from you!

1. Professional Training in TEFL and Other Language Services
In our view, professional training is one of the most important aspects of any kind of organisation, and so training is a key part of our vision. It is also an obligation for cooperatives in Catalonia to reserve 10% of their profits for training purposes.

Whether you are a TEFL practitioner, translator, editor or author, we hope that you are as interested in professional development as we are.

If you do decide to become a member of the co-operative, we hope you will take advantage of some of the written guides, workshops, and webinars that we offer.

Selection of SLB Training Topics:

  • Teacher training
  • Online marketing
  • Using a Learning Management System (LMS) like Edmodo
  • Edtech training
  • Using specialised translation software
  • Training in specialised teaching approaches, e.g. dogme, lexical approach, CLIL
Sponsorship

If an cooperative member wants sponsorship to attend a TEFL conference, take a qualification, or undertake some research, he or she may submit a proposal.

Please get in touch with the SLB team to find out more.

2. Access to shared teaching technology

All members of Serveis Linguistics de Barcelona are promised access to our technological resources. As a member you will have:

  • Full training on how to use and best implement our LMS
  • Access to cooperative owned tablet computers
  • Use of all our other cooperative technology
3. Advertising and online marketing services
We offer a Google-integrated online advertising platform for our language service providers. Your profile will be featured on the site, and will be advertised to potential clients via our on-site search facility.

Without going into the sticky details, the profiles offer multimedia functions, and help you market yourself in the most effective way possible.

In fact, why not just check out our language service provider profiles to see for yourself!

In case you were wondering about how we set our provider fees, you may charge an amount that you are comfortable with, so long as it does not fall below our minimum threshold as stipulated in our statutes. We believe that our associates should work within the boundaries of healthy competition, and we actively discourage undercutting — a practice that really does harm our industry.

4. Materials and Resource Bank for Language Professionals
Many experienced teachers create hundreds of hours of specialised materials for their own use, but our philosophy is to share our work in the creation of an extensive, exclusive, and growing ELT materials bank for our associates. Every member of the co-operative is invited to contribute to this by sharing or creating course material, lesson plans, and examinations, etc.

Additionally, we compile databases of every translation job we do and make this available to our socios. These valuable resources can make tricky translations in specialised areas a sight easier, as the user can see how certain phrases were previously translated.

We edit and carefully vet this material to ensure that it meets SLB’s high standards, before releasing it for general cooperative use. We also aim to develop and market our materials in the future, thereby bringing additional income into the cooperative and to the authors.

5. Bring your clients to the cooperative

Why? For a small admin and development charge, SLB will take care of customer service and billing, provide you with cover if you are sick or on holiday, arrange to pay you monthly (no matter when the client pays) – respecting our minimum hourly rates – and provide you with third-party insurance.

Please contact us for more details.

6. Legal and Financial Advice and Management

Our associates are welcome to come to us with any doubts and queries relating to taxation, financial management, invoicing, or becoming freelance (autónomo) in Spain. We also provide helpful documentation to walk our partners through the various, and sometimes quite complicated bureaucratic processes.

We provide training in the following areas:

  • Catalan/Spanish bureaucracy
  • Finance
  • Tax advice

In addition, we offer very competitive accounting and other financial management services for freelancers.