Part II & III – Coordinate with linguists and colleagues

Part II – Coordinate with colleagues

Work closely with your colleagues. It sounds like a common topic but it’s true that we should respect and understand every one of our colleagues and work together and help out each other when necessary. No doubt that you are competitors and your boss will always compare between different employees to see which one is more appropiate for future development, but at the meantime you are also partners that work together to help establish good image of your clients towards your company. Ask for help any time when you need them and provide help every time when you are in need. Positively share trustful resources and also learn from other’s cases in dealing with clients and projects. The world is built up by countless possibilities and at any time you’ll encounter other’s experience.

Part III – Coordinate with Linguists

A talented translator brings you everything. And the most difficult and challenging task is to assign your job to those APPROPIATE ones every time. You’ll have to consider timing, cost and quality to plan as a whole. It takes time to create a long list of linguists for each language, and their expertise area that they are good at. Try to “store” as many resources in case some day many of them are not able to work on urgent jobs. It’s important to have their online contact address like MSN or SKYPE in case it comes often urgent job and it seems not direct enough to communicate and assign only by email, plus if internet environment is bad, we might prefer more to communicate online rather than sending emails.

It is also important to maintain a nice relationship with you linguists. In some sense they are your money-maker. Try to be friends with them. Help them solve out problems that they encounter when they translate. “Associate” is one of the important role of project manager. That requires 100% mastery of translation and edit tools as aid. That is a must if you don’t want to waste those really talented translator without knowledge of using tools. Also, you’ll have to be aware of each translator’s daily capacity to be more accurate at assigning jobs. You’ll have to “foresee” the result and consequence after you assign a project and be confident with your choice and arrangement.

It’s kind of like maths problem to be a businees man to choose and to give up translators because you have to calculate between their cost and how much your clients pay and to help your company save cost. It’s also kind of like you are playing a role as an HR to choose out of hundreds of thousands of translators throughout the world for your translation kingdom. Sometimes you may be very proud to develop a satisfying resource and sometimes you get really mad when you cannot even understand what the hell is talking about in his translation, and striving to assign to another better one so that not to ruin the whole project, won’t you?

After cooperating with them for several times you may judge the translator by yourself how well he/she does the translation, at the meantime don’t forget to get feedback from the editor and clients. Timing is also vital. Always get more time for yourself to prepare and require an earlier deadline than what the clients is asking for to avoid any sudden “accident”: computer failure, temporary emergency, unexpected errors, unacceptable quality etc…. EVERYTHING can happen. What we only can do is to learn from our lessons each time and accumulate experience to be more aware and careful next time.

(To be continued)