Queries from the Customers

As project managers, you can always receive different kinds of queries from the customer after you deliver the translation. Actually it is a very difficult part for project management job especially when the customer needs you to give the answer as soon as possible. In most cases, project managers don’t know about the target language, and neither do the customers. So many queries are judged from the format of the translation. For example, the customer might find for the same source language, there are different translation in target language and they would like to check if it is correct to be different. As Chinese speakers, we know that it happens a lot for the same English word, there can be several kinds of translation in Chinese according to the context.

There are also some queries caused by the Word. I once send one sentence in the word file to be translated in Dutch and when the translation was returned back, there was no spaces in the translation and the Dutch characters were all connected together. I didn’t know why that happened and when the translator sent the translation in the email or PDF, the format was correct and the spaces were regular.

Recently we have been working on a project with 75 pieces word files and when we were done with the translation and delivered them to the customer, they found the format wasn’t correct. And we have to spend almost a day on DTP. At first, we thought the format of the translation was the same with the file provided by the customer and they must make a mistake. But when they sent the PDF file, it was indeed different from the format we saw. Maybe the customer used a higher version Word or something. It really bothers a lot that the format of word files shown in your computer is different from the format shown in customers’ side or translator’s side. This could cause messy code, wrong translation or wrong formats which are all very serious problems. So to avoid such problem happened, the customer also requires delivering both the word file and PDF file. And project managers also require the translators to deliver both versions.

Some other queries I have met contain to short the characters of the translation. But sometimes it is difficult to achieve. The characters amount is different in different languages for the same sentence and hard to control.