yndigo

Translation as learning process

Not all projects go perfectly. The following describes a recent job a friend at another agency told me about (I know — sounds like, “Doctor, my friend has this problem” but it’s true). I too have my share of past failures to learn from, but this was a doozy.

The project: almost 2,000 files due in two weeks! Yes, you read right. Not words. Not pages. But 2,000 files. A lot of them were one page in length. Many were rather longer. File types included Excel, Word, PDF, PowerPoint, html, and a few jpegs for good measure.

The language pair was overwhelmingly Spanish to English with a handful of others thrown in to make the job especially fun. On top of that, existing English in the source files would make the per-word billing particularly cumbursome. The only silver lining was the general subject matter.

Now why would any agency accept such a job? Why promise success when the chances of success seem so slim? The answer of course is simple: money. And the justification, automatic: “if we don’t take it, another agency will.”

I don’t fault them for thinking this way; I’ve had occasion to believe that my team has the experience to handle any translation job as well or better than other agencies. “If someone’s gonna do it, it might as well be us.”

On the other hand, since I opened my own agency, I’ve taken a measure of pride in the fact that we don’t accept just any job, particularly if it cannot be, humanly, done well. Though we often push the limits of volume and speed, we do try to educate the client on what it will take to do the job right. But as we know, client education notwithstanding, sometimes a deadline is a deadline.

And, in these difficult economic times, refusing jobs based on feasibility seems a quaint throwback to better days, so I am especially sympathetic. My criticism of the agency’s decision to accept the job is therefore limited. Its execution however is something I will address.

The major problem in this case was that the agency was never able to assess the full scope of the job before they leapt right in. And there was never time to catch up. From my experience this has become the biggest no-no. If you have a hundred pages due in 3 days, you must, as a project manager, take the first hour to look at each page — no matter how loud the clock is ticking — to foresee complications in terms of subject matter, formatting, consistency, etc., before deciding how to assign it. The mistake here was a shortage of project managers.

A project manager generally handles 5 or more projects at one time. Here, one job should be handled by 5 people, especially in the first couple days. Put enough resources on it — even if you have to hire them on the spot (a luxury the poor economy actually does afford us), so that a set of eyes can see the content of every single file. Otherwise, the last couple days will be full of surprises.

According to the metrics performed by an agency where I worked, a good project manager can handle the equivalent of 200,000 words per month, maximum. So with the two-week turnaround, this project would have constituted a 4 to 5-project manager job. A smaller profit for sure, and an anomaly in this do-more-with-less economy, but using additional resources smartly might have made an affordable world of difference.

Most additional problems on the project — there were many — stemmed from this initial failure to allocate enough management resources to it. Translators must take some of the blame here too. Some failed to look up from their work to see if they could indeed handle all the files they agreed to translate. Still, 95% of the translations were delivered by the deadline, a rousing success under the circumstances, and priceless in the learning process.