Having been worked as a resource manager for almost 4 months, now I have transferred to be a project manager. My first mission as a project manager was to assign a trial translation from one important customer.

This task was quite a challenge to me because if I could handle the trial translation well we could win more business from our customer. I felt desperately to succeed on the trial translation.

I consulted other project managers about the good translators on these language pairs and waited for their quick reply impatiently after sending emails. Unluckily, they didn’t give me a response after a few hours.

Since the delivery date we promised to our customer was very tight, I had to contact more translators for the trial translation. It was only until the evaluation results for the trial translation came out that I began to realize that my emails to the good translators might go to their spam folder so I never got their reply.

My first assignment of trial translation didn’t go well. After I delivered the finished trial translation to the customer, they found many junior mistakes and questioned the quality strongly. I felt quite panic and asked the translators to help revise immediately.

The customer wasn’t very satisfied with trial translation at the very beginning and I had left a bad impression with the customer. When the final evaluation result came out, the situation still didn’t take a turn for the better at all.

The customer asked me a lot of questions about the trial translation and I just kept explaining. Actually I didn’t quite figure out why we got a low grade on the trial translation. All the translators I chose for the trail translation had got many positive feedbacks from other customers and the editors were all certified.

How could we get a poor grade in the final? I guess mostly because the translators might not have enough experience on TV manual translation even though they are all professional translators.

In conclusion, my first experience of trial translation project assignment isn’t a pleasant one. I learned a valuable lesson from this experience. For trial translation from customers, you had to try every means to find the best translators to work on it.

And the translators should also have enough translation experience in the related field. To avoid junior mistakes in translation, it is better to request the translator to use Trados for translaiton and provide the TM along with the clean file. I believe I could do much better in future trial translation projects assignment.