THE CHALLENGES OF LANGUAGE IN LARGE PROJECTS
If you go through a whole HR process to select the members of your team, why not ask yourself a few questions when choosing the translator(s) that will provide language services for your team? Ideally, they will be part of the team for the life of the project....
Most managers and team leaders pay utmost attention to the quality of the engineering and legal professionals in their team, often forgetting that the bad or inaccurate translation of a carefully-crafted report can destroy any chances for the approval or funding of a project, not to mention the potential costly legal consequences resulting from something as simple as a missing a comma.
However, most people have no clue on how to choose the right translator to work with their teams, and the aspects to consider go beyond a simple diploma. I do admit this might be a very confusing aspect for many, even for experienced hiring managers and team leaders, so after many years working with technical translations in the energy, mining and legal industries, I’ve prepared this checklist to help you choose the right language services provider for your project.
1. First of all, you need to define the language combinations you will need.
This may sound obvious, but it is a key aspect in choosing the right translator. Most translators are good translating into their own native language but not the opposite. Of course, some translators can translate into and from more than one language, but if you’ll be needing this kind of service, make sure your translator is one of them. Once the project is rolling at full speed and deadlines fly by, changing translators might be quite distracting and time-consuming.
Make sure your translator knows who is producing which document: I once landed in the middle of a due diligence in which one third of the team spoke Portuguese, another third spoke Spanish, and another third spoke English. They all thought they understood each other. By the time the documents first reached me, they had been translated to and from all those languages, repeatedly. However, I noticed the bid was to be presented in Spanish but the figures had been determined by the English-speaking team. The Spanish-speaking team was talking about bidding X “billones”, until I asked if they were aware of the difference between “billones” and “billions”. They were not. So they were actually about to bid for “000” more than had been approved by the parent company and the financiers. Needless to say, they would have certainly won the bid, but only to head into a huge lawsuit.
2. Diplomas and Certificates are not enough.
Although a University degree or the certification from a Translators Association such as ATA, ATIO, etc., can establish a baseline of quality, they do not guarantee a good translation of an Environmental Assessment Study or a PPA. The translator needs to be educated in the field, so previous work experience and/or studies in the field are critical.
3. Deadlines.
Big projects usually deal with long documents and impossibly tight deadlines. Make sure your translator knows the extent of each document and the deadline required and, if necessary, that your translator can supervise other translators.
You can either hire other translators yourself or let your translator set up a team they trust. Either way, everyone needs to be realistic about what can and cannot be achieved. Regardless of the promises of software developers, there’s only so much a single translator can do in a day. Experienced professional translators, in order to guarantee the quality of their work, can usually translate between 2,500 – 5,000 words per day, depending on their experience in the field, the format of the document, and a few other variables. It is possible, though, to translate more working overtime (personally, I’ve managed to translate up to 12,500 words in a very long day and part of the night, but that is my record, not my usual performance).
4. Confidentiality - the key of the business.
Do you know who’s handling/reading/translating/proofreading/editing your documents? Nowadays, perhaps all you know is that you send a document by email but, after that, you have no control whatsoever. You should always be able to ask your translator which kind of measures they take to guarantee the confidentiality of all your information.
Regardless of whether your translator signs a confidentiality agreement or not, by default, every document should be treated as confidential.
Who participates in the translation process? Is somebody else doing the translation/edition/proofreading/delivery of the document? Do they use the cloud? USB drives? Do they work through someone else’s LAN? All these elements should be taken into consideration.
Although most translators will want to see the document before accepting it, you want to make sure that there is accountability for the confidentiality of your documents. In the case of some agencies, have seen careless project managers send mass emails to translators labelled “highly confidential”, to see who would like to take the job –if there were any leaks, how could they be tracked?
5. And finally, ethics. This involves every aspect of the process but, how can you assess this element? Check the references. How long has your translator been working with the same clients? If there had been any issues in this regard, clients would have probably left.
In the next blog entry, I will be giving you a few tips on how to make your translator’s life easier –and more productive for you.
Most managers and team leaders pay utmost attention to the quality of the engineering and legal professionals in their team, often forgetting that the bad or inaccurate translation of a carefully-crafted report can destroy any chances for the approval or funding of a project, not to mention the potential costly legal consequences resulting from something as simple as a missing a comma.
However, most people have no clue on how to choose the right translator to work with their teams, and the aspects to consider go beyond a simple diploma. I do admit this might be a very confusing aspect for many, even for experienced hiring managers and team leaders, so after many years working with technical translations in the energy, mining and legal industries, I’ve prepared this checklist to help you choose the right language services provider for your project.
1. First of all, you need to define the language combinations you will need.
This may sound obvious, but it is a key aspect in choosing the right translator. Most translators are good translating into their own native language but not the opposite. Of course, some translators can translate into and from more than one language, but if you’ll be needing this kind of service, make sure your translator is one of them. Once the project is rolling at full speed and deadlines fly by, changing translators might be quite distracting and time-consuming.
Make sure your translator knows who is producing which document: I once landed in the middle of a due diligence in which one third of the team spoke Portuguese, another third spoke Spanish, and another third spoke English. They all thought they understood each other. By the time the documents first reached me, they had been translated to and from all those languages, repeatedly. However, I noticed the bid was to be presented in Spanish but the figures had been determined by the English-speaking team. The Spanish-speaking team was talking about bidding X “billones”, until I asked if they were aware of the difference between “billones” and “billions”. They were not. So they were actually about to bid for “000” more than had been approved by the parent company and the financiers. Needless to say, they would have certainly won the bid, but only to head into a huge lawsuit.
2. Diplomas and Certificates are not enough.
Although a University degree or the certification from a Translators Association such as ATA, ATIO, etc., can establish a baseline of quality, they do not guarantee a good translation of an Environmental Assessment Study or a PPA. The translator needs to be educated in the field, so previous work experience and/or studies in the field are critical.
3. Deadlines.
Big projects usually deal with long documents and impossibly tight deadlines. Make sure your translator knows the extent of each document and the deadline required and, if necessary, that your translator can supervise other translators.
You can either hire other translators yourself or let your translator set up a team they trust. Either way, everyone needs to be realistic about what can and cannot be achieved. Regardless of the promises of software developers, there’s only so much a single translator can do in a day. Experienced professional translators, in order to guarantee the quality of their work, can usually translate between 2,500 – 5,000 words per day, depending on their experience in the field, the format of the document, and a few other variables. It is possible, though, to translate more working overtime (personally, I’ve managed to translate up to 12,500 words in a very long day and part of the night, but that is my record, not my usual performance).
4. Confidentiality - the key of the business.
Do you know who’s handling/reading/translating/proofreading/editing your documents? Nowadays, perhaps all you know is that you send a document by email but, after that, you have no control whatsoever. You should always be able to ask your translator which kind of measures they take to guarantee the confidentiality of all your information.
Regardless of whether your translator signs a confidentiality agreement or not, by default, every document should be treated as confidential.
Who participates in the translation process? Is somebody else doing the translation/edition/proofreading/delivery of the document? Do they use the cloud? USB drives? Do they work through someone else’s LAN? All these elements should be taken into consideration.
Although most translators will want to see the document before accepting it, you want to make sure that there is accountability for the confidentiality of your documents. In the case of some agencies, have seen careless project managers send mass emails to translators labelled “highly confidential”, to see who would like to take the job –if there were any leaks, how could they be tracked?
5. And finally, ethics. This involves every aspect of the process but, how can you assess this element? Check the references. How long has your translator been working with the same clients? If there had been any issues in this regard, clients would have probably left.
In the next blog entry, I will be giving you a few tips on how to make your translator’s life easier –and more productive for you.
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