Categories: translation, trials
Date: 26 July 2009 15:37:58
One of the reasons for my letting off steam the other day was because try as I might to educate my clients into their seeing me as part of the overall team on a project, I seem to fail.
The problem is not just that I have to educate my clients (in this case, agencies) but I have to persuade them to educate their clients (the end-client who has commissioned the translation). It doesn't seem as if it should be too hard to do but it apparently is!
When planning projects end-clients no doubt go to huge lengths to ensure everyone in their organisation produces the text, diagrams, etc for the final document to some sort of schedule. They remember that there are various people involved in the stages and that time has to be built in for the documents to go to print or go live on line. They often seem to forget the small business of translation. Why, oh why, do they not consult the translation agency and ask for their opinion on how long a translator might need to translate a document? And, why, oh why, do they not then build in this extra time into the schedule and adjust the timings as necessary?
On Friday an agency for which I have worked for several years now and for which I have done thousands of words of translation for a particular end-client contacted me with a translation schedule. The volume of work to be translated (by me) and proofread (by another) and double-checked (by me) and delivered to the end-client by Wednesday evening (deadline set in stone) is actually too great to be done in the *working days* available.
An organisation does not produce this volume of text in an hour. Someone, somewhere must have known that this project was in the pipeline. Could they not have given the agency (and thus me) prior warning of their intentions? We could then perhaps have asked them to get their own skates on in order to deliver the work to us a day or so ahead of their original date - and all would have been well. But no.
This is why, gentle reader, I am sitting at my desk on a Sunday afternoon in an attempt to carve out some extra time to keep ahead of the schedule, looking at a document which has a certain tone of irony. Its title? Leisure time.