Under the trend of global economic integration, China’s economic cooperation and labor cooperation with foreign countries have been increasing continuously and rapidly, which greatly improved the development of translation industry, but also brought great challenge to it.

To do more projects and do better has become the consensus of all; but it is hard to ensure work efficiency and quality by only taking “huge crowd strategy” when massive multi-disciplinary and multilingual translation tasks come.

Moreover, the provider of translation service should be an organization not an individual; even when dealing with a very small work task, according to the contemporary management theory, still need collaborative work of translation, proofreading and verification, in order to avoid any problems that may be brought by randomness and negligence of individual.

A translation company may need to handle dozens of projects per day; and each of those projects is a window to show company image and win reputation, thus is the lifeblood of the company.

During the transformation from traditional translation service industry to a modern one, adoption of project management in translation activity is of significant importance to a translation company, as it can standardize business process, improve management means, rein in quality control measures and realize a neo-modern business modern.

“A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end, and therefore defined scope and resources, undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about predefined products, services or results.”

“Project management is the application of knowledge, skills and techniques to execute projects effectively and efficiently, so as to solve the project problems or meet the project demand.” The alleged “management” contains the five disciplines of leading, organizing, motivating, planning, and controlling.

The translation service activity has exactly all the features of a “project”. Translation project management infers to the project manager making use of all the techniques, tools and modern management methods, straightening out the work links of translation, revision, DTP etc, to complete the translation task with quality and quantity ensured in accordance with the client’s demand, and controlling the cost within the proposed budget meanwhile.

Translation project management is the translation management capability and practice that any large translation company must endeavor to implement and execute.

In concrete, in the translation project management of a translation company, the most important elements are quality management, progress management and cost management.

Whether the project management is successful or not ultimately lies on the quality of the translation product, promptness of delivery, rationality of budget, satisfaction of client, etc.

A translation project, which can fulfill quality requirement and be delivered timely in accordance with the original progress within the budget, can be deemed to be successful.

Read Also: Training Course Translation and Typesetting with FrameMaker