Having worked as a resource manager for almost 4 months, I did find some problem exposed in our daily work. For example, everyday we could receive dozens of emails from different translators majoring in translation of different languages and different field applying for being a part-time translator of our company.

One the other hand, our project managers are having a hard time assigning translation files. It happens occasionally when you contact 20 translators for a single project, you couldn’t get any replies or get declined by all the translators for all kinds of reasons.

From this phenomenon, it is easy for you to tell that the resources are not enough and we should seek more translators from different platforms online. But our energy and budget is limited, so we should focus on the language pairs that bring our company the most profit and check if the related translators could meet the needs of project assignment and draw up a plan of recruitment.

Resource managers need to make an analysis of the monthly sales and hear from the project managers through a weekly meeting.

Another problem bothers us is how to reduce translation cost. I have found that translators in our database have different rates for the same language pair and the rate difference can be very huge sometimes.

Only a small proportion of translators could bring us profit when we are hiring them. You can’t deny that there are some professional translators who won’t lower their rates which are higher than we quote to our customers.

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We have to admit that these kind of translators are not our cooperators. Resource managers don’t need to hire the best translators. They should find these translators who could just meet the requirements of the customer within our budget. It is really a big challenge for resource managers but that is what the resourcing work about.

We also get a lot of sample translation projects from customers. I don’t know how much we passed and how much we failed. But there existed these sample translations that we did but the customer isn’t satisfied.

Sometimes you have to think that passing the sample translation or not depends on luck. Or you may think the project manager doesn’t select the right translators to do the job. How could resource managers help on that?

It really takes some time to get to know the translators and project managers spend more time with translators because they work on projects together. While project managers know some translators better than resource managers, resource managers can contact with more translators.

In daily work, resource managers should recommend some translators to project managers regularly so project managers are able to get to know more translators and have more choices in mind for sample translations.