I started working for CCJK in early June, as of today, it is 5 months. Although I haven’t dealt with very big project until now, I believe that the process of all translation projects is the same.

Here I briefly organized the process of translation project from a new client for your reference, and I hope it would be helpful for you in future.

1. Give a quote

When you receiving the enquiry from a new client, the first thing you should do is giving a quote to him/her. But before you make a quotation, you have to calculate the word count through Word or Trados, if the document is difficult to be analyzed, you have to use ABBYY or Solid to transferred the document to word format. There is a template of quotation in our company, you can just modify the data according to it, then send it to the client in PDF format. It includes unit rate, total quotation and estimated delivery time of the project.

2. Sign a contract

For a big project, you should add an item about prepaid amount in the contract, usually it is 50%. There is also a template and you just have to update some information of the client and project.

3. Assign a responsible project manager

An experienced project manager can help you to win the trust of your client. So you can assign the project to the right one according to the difference of it.

4. Update the process of the translation to the client

Most of you may omit to update the process of the translation to your client, but if you can send him/her an email, even a simple one, it is also helpful to win your client’s trust.

5. Take a look at the translation before you send it to your client.

If you do not take a look at the translation before you send it to your client, it probably will produce a series of problems. For example, if your client pointed out a obvious mistranslation, but you do not know where it is, how would the client feel?

6. Amend the translation until the client feels satisfied with it.

If your client is not satisfied with the translation, you should say sorry to your client first and then revise it for him/her as soon as possible.

It seems like the procedures are simple, but it is very difficult to do all these well, especially give a quotation to the client, you have to be good at using ABBYY, Solid, Trados and other tools. So I’ll work harder and harder to avoid any mistakes.

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