Efficient project management for your translation projects.

Before the pandemic started I had the amazing opportunity to share my thoughts about project management in the translation industry in front of an elite public, freelance translators interested in growing and expanding their horizon and professional network in the translation industry. The event was hosted in Cluj by TranslateCluj, and I had to speak in front of a large number of translators about this industry.

I initially felt as an impostor, as I am not a translator. I have no superior linguistic studies. However, here I was, standing in front of them, being passionate about this industry for 12 years back then and 15 years today. But I like to think that we do not sell translations, but project management services.

What started out as a side business introduced to me by my high school colleague soon became my baby. The Department was born out of my desire to do things my own way. With a great team on my side, the transition was smooth. We practically grew up together and continued our path guided by the same values, all respect-oriented. Even if it sounds cheesy, if you don’t value and respect yourself, no one else will. 

More simply said, it does not all revolve around earnings and checking a task off your list. It’s about the process and how you manage to handle everything. Our approach paid off during the past years: most of our clients have chosen us following a recommendation they received, and they choose us over and over again due to the good professional relationship that we have.  

During my experience as a people manager, project manager or business owner, I had the chance to experience first-hand what are the benefits of simply being respectful with the people you work with. 

It all goes beyond costs and deadlines. At the end of the day, it all comes down to being happy about how you managed to do your job, the relationships that you build and doing something meaningful. I always go by the saying: Treat others how you want to be treated. 

This is how my presentation on project management for translators looked like – not as pretty as the actual Power Point slides, but containing the same highlights:

Don’t forget to respect:
• yourselves
• your business
• the people your work with
• your clients

If you don’t value and respect yourself wholeheartedly, no one else will either.

Freelancing means…

• being a translator
• being a business owner
• being an all-in-one employee: doing the books, handling your contracts, dealing with late payments, IT issues and all the rest.

Being a project manager, in fact.
Whether you realize it or not.

While drafting the slides for this presentation on project management in the translation industry, I took some time to talk to a few translators to have their input on what the ideal PM would look like. 

As you might notice, the wishes that the PM and the translator seem to have overlap quite a bit. I am curious how would you continue the list that I started earlier. Let’s see. We have the following so far: treat us as equals, be proactive, offer support and don’t be pushy. 

What boxes do you have to tick as a PM-Translator?

• be competent, with technical expertise;
• be organized;
• be proactive and a multitasker;
• be cool under pressure;
• be flexible and creative;
• be a great communicator;
• meet the deadlines.

Aside from translating, remember that you:

• drive sales;
• manage contacts and contracts with clients;
• draft quotes and follow-up with potential jobs;
• prepare the projects for translation for end-clients;
• keep your terminology resources up to date;
• issue invoices and follow-up on payments.

Your time-management skills must be sky high in order to deal with everything in a professional manner.

Speaking of time management, take advantage of all the resources you can find, such as:

• Tasks management – Trello;
• Storage and remote access – Google Drive/Dropbox;
• E-mail – Outlook;
• OCR – Abby Fine Reader;
• CAT Tools: SDL Trados or other free (online) tools;
• Terminology: iate, Microsoft Language Portal, Linguee;
• QA Tool – Verifika/XBench;
• Project Management – Wordbee (CAT Tool included);
• TranslateTools+– includes a tool to remove unwanted tags from documents.

It might not seem such a difficult job writing an e-mail. But it is. And doing it just right, choosing the right tone, what to point out, what’s the perfect length it should have, if it serves its purpose. Or quite the opposite. 

It might seem basic, but some of our main challenges while training junior project managers were to make them see the big picture and properly addressing something. Be it an e-mail, a phone call, a request sent out to a fellow colleague or translator. 

Keep in mind these simple steps for an efficient management of your translation projects:

1. reply to the requests in a timely and professional manner;
2. perform a volume and time frame analysis before accepting a project;
3. make sure you have a PO/payment/contract for the job;
4. request clarifications or instructions;
5. prepare the files for translation;
6. translate and proofread;
7. run a QA;
8. perform the final touches on the layout and deliver on time;
9. update the Translation Memory;
10. make sure you issue the invoice and follow-up the payment;
11. have a clear overview on your projects until they are closed (delivered and paid).

And remember: You already have a superpower. Babies can’t be delivered in one-month, whatever project managers will tell you.
Don’t be afraid to sometimes say NO.

••

We have a small collection of articles on our blog for your breaks from lists and work instruments. Two of these are on literary translations and creative writing – you can find them here.

Published on: 24.03.2023

Why finding the right localization partner early on is vital to long-term success?

Providing services should come along with great customer care, and the language industry should be no exception, but an example of how communication should be at the very core of our training and business.

Relationship sells.

The best client is the one that you already have.

I am not much of a fan of sales trainings, but these two phrases stuck with me.

It’s not a coincidence that our motto is: “Not just a team of translators, but your translation department“. We built our business on this foundation, and it shows: 90% client retention and excellent relationships with all our clients.

If I were to make a list on what we have been doing for the past 13 years without having sales trainings or other sophisticated courses on business development, I would say these are some of our core beliefs:

1. Place customers at the center of everything you do;
2. Make customer services part of your brand’s DNA;
3. Don’t overpromise. Be honest and keep your word;
4. Be human. Avoid template-based communication;
5. Help customers help themselves – it might look like you are losing business, but you gain trust and respect for your expertise;
6. Be proactively helpful;
7. Our client, our boss. Respect your client and make it about the partnership that you have;
8. Maintain your focus throughout your entire collaboration, not just until you obtain the customer;
9. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and treat them as you would like to be treated;
10. Live their journey.

This is quite an introduction about how we managed to become a vital partner for the localization department of a global e-commerce platform supplier. What you need in a partner, and especially a localization partner, is for them to check as many boxes as they can from the above list, alongside with their expertise on translation and localization, of course.

We asked VTEX – global e-commerce platform supplier now NYSE-listed – to evaluate how we helped them in their rapid expansion, in our role of localization partner, and the reality check was even greater than we could’ve expected – it seems that our customer, when choosing the right partner, is also looking for the things we listed above.

VTEX’s global expansion: a localization perspective
Why finding the right partner early on is vital to long term success?

“VTEX, now a Brazilian unicorn NYSE-listed company and a leader in ecommerce solutions, started factoring in localization as it hit its first expansion roadblock in the US, where a native experience doesn’t entail a word-for-word translation of an interface, but rather comprises a comprehensive set of parameters that are unique to that regional target audience. Expanding into LATAM was one thing, this was a whole new ball game, and we needed to up the ante. At the same time, the first deals started coming in from Europe, with Romania, Italy, and Spain leading the way. An entirely new problem emerged for the first time, one that would increase in frequency as VTEX continuously expanded: none of the localization team members at that time (numbering a whopping 3 team members), spoke any Italian.

As Europe and the US became the new frontiers for the company, requests started flooding in, not just for localization into Spanish and English, but now also into Romanian and Italian. We urgently needed a partner, one that could work fast, with little notice, and understand what we needed even we weren’t so sure ourselves. After an exhaustive search which led nowhere, I was ready to give up on finding a global partner and instead try to work with smaller local ones where possible. During a weekly call with Cristi, then VTEX’s Romania country manager and now in charge of Eastern Europe, I expressed my frustration at not finding the partner I was looking for. His reaction was, “well, did you speak to Cristina from The Department?”. Which department is what crossed my mind, but then I understood. Cristina had worked with Cristi on a different project before, for another company, and as he put it, her company’s services were the best he’d seen.

Long story short, we partnered with them, and I’ve come to realize that it was one of those godsent moments that define a company’s long-term success. We’re a chaotic bunch, always racing against the incoming tide of an increasingly fast expansion, with localization being at the center of providing a native user experience, be it through a global setting or on a local user level. Our checkout module currently supports around 30 languages natively, and our admin is fully deployed in 7 languages; our blog posts and business case studies are published in 5-6 languages, and so on.

How can a team of 12 ever compete with the rest of the company, now at over 1300 strong? We can’t do it by ourselves, and here is where Cristina and her team come in. She is our localization project manager in all but her email address. She probably knows more about VTEX than most of our staff, and for a good reason, as she’s been personally managing and organizing all the requests that we cannot handle in-house.

Her team is dedicated, responds well to feedback, and most importantly, can deliver consistent quality in less than 24 hours. Together, we’ve launched Romanian and Japanese as full admin language options, have deployed our checkout front-end experience in more than 25 languages, and have overcome numerous challenges, from subtitling 50+ hours of training videos for LATAM partners to putting together a translation memory to training on the use of CAT tools. Finnish admin in a week? No problem. Arabic RTL layout expert? Sure. Korean UX changes for a native experience? All done.

Many of these things are not expected of a typical partner agency, but Cristina and her team have never let us down. We don’t consider them a partner; we consider them part of the team. If you’re looking for reliability and consistent quality at a moment’s notice, I would not recommend anyone else.”

Vladimir Montanu
Head of Localization at VTEX

••

We have a small collection of articles on our blog, for your breaks from lists and work instruments. Two of these are on literary translations and creative writing – you can find them here.

Published on: 12.08.2021

TRANSLATIONS IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC

The silver lining or how to remain optimistic during the actual global circumstances. Here are some ideas on what to do.

First of all, we hope you are all well and in good health. Now, more than ever, we are thinking of the people around us, realizing the importance of standing by one another, whether we are thinking of our families, our colleagues, or our partners.

We were caught off guard in a situation without precedent in recent times. We found ourselves separated from our dear ones, from our fellow workers. Some of us have completely changed our way of working. While we are not ignoring the difficulties we are facing in this period, we have chosen to take stock of the good parts, as we experienced them at The Department, in the management of our translation projects, translations in the time of pandemic. Because our reality is more than just this virus. The reality is that we continue to exist, to work, to joke with our colleagues, to be closer than ever to the ones around us, in spite of the physical distance which separates us.

Take a look at some of the positive aspects we have experienced during this time:

• Flexibility and streamlining of our way of working – in order to effectively manage working from home, especially when there are several members within the team, now is the time to introduce into the common procedure the instruments which can help you work more easily and more efficiently. Now, as well as in the future, whatever the future may look like;
• Developing the ability to plan  a day, to plan your time – in order to have the discipline of carrying through your daily tasks, with the same concentration. And also the discipline of taking the much-needed breaks;
• Diversifying, whether consciously or not, your people management techniques– so as to manage a remote team efficiently, as well as with empathy and support, against the current background;
• Eliminating paperwork – since in Romania we still need papers and stamps for certain translations, this is a welcome break. For us and for the planet, as well. Our hopes are that we will then see a change, namely getting rid of certain useless procedures;
• Spurring creativity – because we have to be creative and this seems to be an auspicious time. To keep our activities going, we have to come up with the most creative solutions. Or to make major changes in approaching the business. Now is the time to take stock of our priorities and skills and to reach major decisions, in order to strengthen what we have built so far. Needs change continually, and we have to keep up with them;
• Empathy and strengthening our relations – because we noticed that absolutely all our interactions with our clients and our external co-workers have been incredible in this period. Absolutely everyone has been more understanding, more considerate to the others. This testifies to the fact that we have surrounded ourselves with valuable people and that we are truly partners, for better or for worse;
• Specialization – because some of us may have the time to focus on improving our training, by taking classes which have always been on the to-do list and never became a priority;
• Clarity – because now is the time to take a step back and clearly establish our priorities. Flight-or-fight mode. This assumes having an overview, which is so necessary for decision-making and for a coherent strategy, whether you are a freelancer or representing a business;

Considering the above, we wanted to share some ideas on how you can better manage this situation:

1. Set up a clear budget. If your income has been affected, you should know what minimum average revenue you will be needing in the following months. Starting from there, make a list of all your expenses for this period. Check whether you can optimize some expenses.
   For instance: state aid that can be provided to you/negotiate a rent reduction. Ask for your accountant’s advice.
2. Make a list of everything else you might need to manage your activity as smoothly and as efficiently as possible. Check whether there are programs or other instruments which can help you and which you are not yet using:
   a. A cloud storage solution – One Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox etc.;
   b. Task organization and management – Trello;
   c. Migration to an email client for more efficient organization of your mail – Outlook;
   d. Cloud-based CAT Tool – Wordfast Anywhere, Memoq Cloud, Wordbee etc.;
   e. Streamlining communication within the team – Slack (you can connect with Trello, LeaveBoard, and many other useful programs) + Zoom (or other video-conferencing platforms).
3. Analyze your income statement and send out customized requests to the clients who have late payments, to make sure that they are supporting you in this period, confirming that they did not misplace the invoices and reminding them to pay the already-provided services.
4. Communicate with your clients, so that they may know that you are operational and that you are there to support them. Communicate empathetically and in a supportive manner. Now more than ever.
5. Conduct an analysis of your personal skills or of your team’s skills and set up a clear strategy applicable to this period. If your revenues have so far been based on conference interpreting or on interactions with the public, rethink the services you provide and make a change matching your strengths. Attend online classes, so that you may be prepared for the new approach.
6. Remember your plan to have a website? Or a website in the foreign language you translate into? Now is the perfect time to carry this plan to completion.
7. Invest time in having an overall view and a strategy. This is crucial.
8. Don’t forget about emotional support. Be kind to yourselves and to your team.

Translations in the time of pandemic – we remain optimistic, by your side,
Cristina Tohănean and the team.

••

We have a small collection of articles on our blog, for your breaks from lists and work instruments. Two of these are on literary translations and creative writing – you can find them here.

Published on: 27.03.2020

Stories about pigeons and Portuguese

I have recently travelled to Angola, a country somewhere in the middle of Africa, on the West coast. An impressive sky, a completely different climate, lots of nature in the city, lots of instinct in the civilization. People talk concisely and directly, in an unequivocal Portuguese.

Their Portuguese is different than the one spoken in Portugal. Once a few phrases ring in your ears, the language sets a rhythm that doesn’t let go of you, just like the firm rhythms of percussion commonly associated to the African lands.

The stories I heard there are incredible, the people there seem to live just like in the movies. For example, it may seem a lot to hear of a woman walls herself up in her own apartment out of fear and who, in order to survive, learns to hunt pigeons using diamonds – however, it is a true story. One which is surely deserving of being passed on.

From behind my computer’s keyboard, sitting in my office chair in Bucharest, I have been in England, honoured to be translating the words of a famous writer, one so generous with his stories which are worth passing on, named José Eduardo Agualusa. Most of the times, the experience of literary translation is so powerful, especially when you like the book, that you have the impression you know a place by heart. And, translating A General Theory of Oblivion, I got to go to Angola as well..

One of the perks of the so-called “minor languages” – even though Portuguese is the fifth most spoken language in the World, the perspective here is that of the market, so the number of speakers is irrelevant – is that the writers who are published are almost exclusively well-known. Publishing houses don’t take the risk of publishing début writers or authors who don’t yet have a proven reputation on the international publishing market, who are not in the headlines, because this way they would lose some of the arguments to sell their books.

As such, I have had the opportunity to translate the novels of the most well-known authors who wrote in Portuguese. It is always an overwhelming feeling to translate the words of famous authors, even if they are unknown in our area – or all the more so, it is because they are not known around here that responsibility is even greater.

Agualusa is the most famous Angolan writer, well-known, of course, also in Portugal, Brazil and Mozambic, and, from one prize to another, he has succeeded in becoming appreciated and promoted at an international level as well. It is still an obscure name in Romania, with only two published translations, two novels, but the time passing between the two was long enough for him to become lost in the publishing industry.

His style is so clear and well-constructed, making it easy for me to learn to dance to his tune. Usually, upon first trying one’s hand at translating, the beginning of a novel still has the clumsiness and conventionalism which are typical between two strangers. It is only upon rereading it, only after the translation is in an advanced stage and there are no more secrets between the author and the translator, that the beginning can be remade using the proper tone and vocabulary. Upon each additional reading, there is something to be corrected, regardless of whether you erase or add a preposition, whether you undo an inversion, rephrase or you decide to translate or to leave a name as it is. It’s just as if the text represented the drawings in the clouds, which Agualusa mentioned in the novel: they change at all times and what you see depends on how long you look at them and on your perspective. A translation is a state of the text, a photo of a drawing made out of clouds, which becomes, in its turn, a travelling cloud under the eyes of other readers.

That is the reason why the discussion with the editor of the book is a very important step, which I look forward to with great interest and curiosity. The editor checks the coherence and stylistics of the writing in the target language. Most of the times, I am prepared with arguments to defend my translation, when needed, to explain my choices, but in the case of the Angolan, everything unfolded just as smoothly and naturally as his writing – an additional confirmation of a good writer. Without feeling a heavy historical or national identity, through stories and characters which leave you breathless just as in an African Pulp Fiction, as it was named in a review, Agualusa talks about his favourite subject: Angola – as a continuous, sincere quest for what is, in fact, yours, what makes you yourself, what good or bad means – and particularly Luanda, its capital city.In this city I have seen things beyond my wildest dreams. These are stories that always lead you to new ones, as serious as they are balanced by a sense of humour. Despite the troubled and gory history of Angola, strained more or less discretely in various episodes in the book, the writing inspired power and optimism, and this really matters for the work atmosphere. However, one spends a few months with a book, until the final version is reached, which is submitted further for revision and editing.

As a Portuguese translator, I especially enjoyed the sincerity and simplicity of the conversations, as if there were no time or reason to avoid, excuse or edulcorate. It is a style that has a specific dynamism and rhythm. I remember that, as I was translating Agualusa’s book, I was more observant of the way we talk to each other, of what and how we say it, of areas and limits, but I guess this is part of the translators’ permeability.

Even if I already know what is about to happen, while translating, the thrill is just as high, especially during dialogues, it is the time you choose the words and you interpret without reserves (nobody sees you), may it be just in thoughts, every character, good or bad. You have the opportunity to experiment different personalities and lexicons and you find out, for example, that the character of the Angolan teenage punk you translate about will know how to swear when angry just as daringly, racily and shyly as you know or as much as you want to let known you know.

I was amused to find out also that one of the greatest fairs in Africa, which started out in Luanda, was named after a famous Brazilian soap opera from the eighties: Roque Santeiro. The Roque Santeiro fair was huge, as big as 500 football fields, made up of rudimentary shacks, counters or products displayed directly on the floor. You could find absolutely anything there, from mayonnaise to diamonds. It was closed in 2011. This is not something I found out from the book, but from the research I did in the background of the translation, an occupation which fascinates me. Checking any proper noun which appears in the text, any date, space or time coordinate or the local colour is a meticulous work, in which I lose myself voluntarily, just as a tenacious detective, however, one who is happy about the availability of the Internet.

The woman who builds a wall between her home and the rest of the world is called Ludovica and she is Portuguese. She lives at the end of colonial Angola and at the start of independent Angola, with all the changes that such an event implies, from a national to a personal level. But the way in which Agualusa tells the story – dryly summed up here – triggers that mechanism which some literary translators say has made them chose their calling: wanting to pass on the story. Ultimately, Agualusa says it as well: A man with a good story is practically a king.

••

[Simina Popa is a literary translator of Portuguese. She has translated authors from Portugal, Brazil, Angola and Mozambique. A General Theory of Oblivion, by José Eduardo Agualusa is the most recent translated novel, published at Polirom]

This article was written by Simina Popa, our guest and our Portuguese translator, to disclose part of the experiences of a literary translator and, perhaps, some of their secrets.

For more articles on the theme of literary translations, plese click here.

Publishing date: 15.04.2019

Literary Translation as a Workshop for Creative Writing

This is a very vast topic. All I can do is scratch at its surface and use my personal experience as a short introduction of sorts.

The other day I searched the Internet for this exact phrase: ‘literary translation workshop for creative writing’. I got back more than 1 million search results. All the major Western universities, English-speaking Western universities seem to have some form of this topic in their curricula. Which is kind of weird. Because why would someone coming from a dominant culture think of linking creative writing (an honest subject matter, by comparison) to translation? Such an exotic concept!

But indeed there’s no better way—not that I know of—of learning the ‘secrets of the craft’. Because, let’s face it, every translator wishes deep down inside his or her own heart to be one day the name on the cover, and not the one hidden somewhere inside the book. Almost like a character. I know that I did that! I nurtured that desire with every new book I translated, and most of the time that kept the writer in me satisfied.
If nothing

If nothing else, I was a writer by proxy.

And from quite early on I started to use all the authors I translated to study their craft. In other words, I started seeing translation as creative rewriting.
There was a clear cut moment for that… epiphany. A tipping point. Up until then I had worked relentlessly and almost mindlessly to churn away book after book, most of them by the grand master of the macabre, none other than Stephen King. And funny enough it was also one of his books that rewired my thinking. It was a book about writing. Eleven years to the day that was. In 2007, four years after I had started making a living by translating literature, I received a message from one of the publishing houses I was working with. They wanted me to start translating On Writing.
Well, I have to say this book did it for me. It ended my long-lasting love affair with the author, and it gave me a push to start seeing things in a different light.

Don’t get me wrong. On Writing is a terrific book. In fact, you most certainly would find it in almost all those Western university’s course bibliographies. It teaches you all you need to know about plot, character, dialogue, back-story, about the dreadful trap of the adverbs, while also stating a few things about the right mindset of a natural-born writer. All good precious things, all true, and delivered in the author’s most honest voice. But, you see, they were all at the same time things that I had seen at work before in Stephen King’s books. I, his translator, maybe his most attentive reader, kind of knew his tricks before he decided to lay them down in front of everybody, in On Writing. And by doing that he really spoiled it for me. On Writing taught me to question every turn of phrase.

After that, only after that I started growing as a translator. And that is because the writer in me needed more. He needed to see for himself that … ‘there are other worlds than these’, to quote from The Dark Tower.

And, like the gunslinger’s world, I moved on. I moved to Ballard, I moved to Palahniuk, I moved to Joyce Carol Oates, I moved to H. P. Lovecraft, I moved to Raymond Chandler, I moved to Denis Johnson … I experimented with their prose, I was eager to learn—and not merely to … earn. I knew that I had access to the best creative writing course in the world. I struggled with Palahniuk’s syncopated prose because I wanted to understand its workings—and I finally did it, otherwise one can never translated truthfully a book. I plowed through Ballard’s hypnotic prose searching for its beat, hearing it closer and closer, until I managed to dance to its techno-trance-like rhythm. I then walked the meandering paths that Joyce Carol Oates uses to guide us through time and space by way of a sometimes very prolix narrative. I followed detective Marlowe, so witty and gay, always having a sharp answer to give. After that I was for almost a year that despicable unreliable narrator Willkie Collins, in Dan Simmons’ Drood. The list could go on and on and on …

You learn the craft of writing through exercise. You imitate at first, then you start coming closer to your own true self. Step by little step at a time. You do it through reading, certainly. There is no way around that. But sometimes some lucky ones get a chance to translate literature. They are handed literally with a permit to imitate. You do it unconsciously for a while, but sooner or later you start seeing patterns, you digest them and make them into reflexes, they become a part of you. A writer who also translates is not only the sum of the books he or she has read, but also the sum of the authors he or she has sung playback after.

This is a very vast topic. And the beauty of it, I think, is that no matter how hard you try, you can always only scratch at its surface. What happens in the deep blue stays in the deep blue. Untranslated ananand untranslatableand untranslatable by conventional means.
and untranslatable by conventional means.

••

[ Mircea Pricăjan is an author and literature translator from English into Romanian. His most recent published book is Pumn de fier. He has been translating over 60 volumes from English into Romanian.]

You can find other literary translation articles here.

This article is from „Confluențe – Analele Universităţii din Oradea, Fascicula Limbi și literaturi moderne Oradea, 2018” and has been published with the author’s approval.

Publishing date: 13.05.2019