unless you're proven in your field and have gotten quite a few elance jobs under your belt you're doubtfully going to be able to get a job and may have to take a risk that you'll get accepted to 2 or more when competing for a bit, just like on rentacoder. I'll be posting a primer on jobs that are actually temp-to-hire or hire that accept applications via the 'net and are telecommute only, including some telemarketing and also all the sites I've found similar the rentacoder with reviews. I'm fairly sure the number of legitimate relatively busy sites numbered around twenty for English-oriented business and one thing that sucks is getting your bid submitted and the date goes by and nothing. I was lucky enough to have a few people gather that I spoke and wrote English more creatively and in a better fashion grammatically (sp?) than the Korean and Indian folks that I compete against for PHP, tech support and other jobs.
I'd say that with a good amount of small jobs done, certifying on elance and a portfolio and proven reference points for completed work you can snag minor jobs on elance but it may not be steady. The advantage to getting the minor jobs on elance and all the certs is that you'll end up being able to snag a job that pays as good or better for part time (25 hour) or full time (40-50 hour) weekly work for months. Price ranges have been downright desperate for good translation and with decent language skills and softwares and online utilities you might make short work of these jobs. Writing jobs are highly competitive and without something that will not only catch the eye of your prospective employer but prove to them that you can cover any job in the contract that _might_ pop up and that you are a dedicated, loyal and hard-working individual, you're going to just lose your twenty dollars you pay for elance subscription or have small returns on it.
In any case, make sure you focus on spreading out your income opportunities, continuing to write for AC, hunt for sites that you can bid for jobs on and keeping in mind on freelance sites if you get your bid accepted you'll lose out if you can't complete the job by the deadline and receive severely negative feedback and try new things with your affiliate marketing, PPC sites and other things as well as keep those things that are steady income for you in-line with minimal effort.
Good luck to you all, if you choose these routes as I have.
l0cke