Lost in education - part 756: Stammkunden

Categories: mrs-tiggywinkle, translation, triumphs

Date: 27 May 2008 23:26:50

One of the dilemmas of taking on as large an assignment as the current one (sorry, did I not mention I am doing a very long assignment on education? How remiss of me) is that one has to consider the needs of one's Stammkunden. The few regular customers I have rely on me (I fondly like to believe) to translate various shorter texts on a reasonably regular basis. It will come as no surprise that I can only type one document at a time and so if I am 110% committed to one client, I have no spare capacity for another.

Of course, I don't want to lose my Stammkunden so I agreed to take on some work (the equivalent of 2 solid days' output) at the end of last week. Naturally, I didn't let them know that I was squishing their work in around the education project.

This particular Stammkunde has a new employee and she was assigned to be the project manager of the squished-in assignment. I translated the document and returned it with a few little queries concerning obscure cultural references. I asked the project manager to explain these in German so that I could find an appropriate translation for them. Perhaps because she's new, or perhaps she didn't understand what I wanted her to do, perhaps she is super-keen or over zealous... I don't know. However, she sent the translation back with lots of amendments. This would have been fine - except that she had bunged in all the false friends and typical German mistakes that I had so carefully avoided and then queried my English in places. As I have practically no relationship with her so far, I felt I had to be very polite and justify my translations, gently correct her "corrections", and generally spend time re-doing the document. The slightly irritating issue was that she hadn't answered my original questions! So off we went round that loop again.

At the end of all this, she sent me an e-mail which said she "had learnt a lot". I'm glad to be of help, but it wasn't really the original objective. Still, she did also say that the translation of one particularly convoluted German sentence was much better in English than the original German. I thanked her kindly. I didn't say that it had taken me five attempts over the weekend to untangle what the author was trying to say. It was expressed in such a complicated way that even when I thought I had sorted it out, I still wasn't sure. It was nice to have it confirmed! So, at the end of all this, I think I have hung on to this particular regular customer - for the time being, anyway.