Velior's Corporate Blog about Translation and Translation Industry

The Entrepreneurial Linguist is an excellent book for translation professionals written by Judy and Dagmar Jenner, identical twins who together run a successful translation business. If you are unsure whether you will benefit from reading this book, a good place to start might be their price list. If you are looking for ways to increase your own rates to the same attractive level, don’t miss the chance to learn from these top people in our industry.

The book focuses on the business side of translation career and suggests a wealth of recommendations on how to run your translation business effectively and grow both professionally and financially. The authors are knowledgeable not just in translation, but also in a variety of other disciplines, which makes their perspective well-rounded and fundamental. For instance, in the professional development chapter, they refer to Stephen R. Covey, which is just one of the many signs of profound knowledge behind the book.

In fact, there is so much valuable information that instead of reviewing the book in the classic sense, I’d rather focus on what appealed to me mostly.

The marketing section of the book provides a system for improving your marketing efforts both online and offline. The central idea is to focus on building your brand by using a variety of tools, including a personal services website, blog, and social media. The harder you work on these tools, the greater your visibility to potential clients. Additionally, by investing time and effort in your blog, you might gradually become an authority in your field, which will likely lead to more customers and higher rates. The book will easily guide you through getting started with these marketing tools.

One of the key takeaways for me was the guide to building a website using Google included in the book. I already benefited from this advice by helping create a simple web presence for another business I am involved in. It took just $10 for the domain name registration and 4 hours of my time, so the savings generated from this advice alone already created a sizable return on investment made in the book. I believe this guide will be of great help for many translators looking for a way to build their online presence economically.

Another series of tips that appealed to me is the suggestions on how to cut your expenses. The basic idea is to buy only what your business really needs and avoid non-essential purchases. For example, you must never hesitate to invest in a dedicated business phone line, but should think twice before buying any gadgets such as a smart phone, which are nice to own and toy with, but contribute little to your success as a translation entrepreneur.

The authors also provide many valuable insights on pricing. They are strong advocates of positioning yourself as providing a superior service, which is in short supply and will result in increased demand. Choosing between “high quality + low output” approach versus “low quality and high output” is often a tough choice for a translator. What this means is that, on the one hand, you can translate very quickly with low quality and accept all projects even when you don’t understand them. This way, you can maintain low rates and make up for small pay by higher volumes of work. The opposite approach is to focus on quality rather than volumes and increase rates respectively. The authors support the latter approach and provide a well-grounded opinion on why you should be a quality-oriented provider and what you can do to maintain higher rates. As our translation company shares the same quality policy, the book once again reinforced my belief that the focus on high quality is right for our company. If you hold this same belief, this book might be a source of positive reinforcement for you as well.

I am confident that most freelance translators and even some of translation agencies will be able to benefit from this book, at least as a source of motivation. While some of the ideas included in the book will be useful mainly for beginning translators, there is a wealth of powerful ideas for seasoned professionals, too. Importantly, the book is so well-structured and profound that you are likely to gain a deeper understanding of, or a different perspective on, what you already know.

On translation forums and blogs, translators often express concerns about whether they should accept an offer from a new client, because they aren’t sure whether the client will pay them. Indeed, the indirect manner of contact (usually via Internet) common in our industry makes it easier to “forget” about paying your translator, because you haven’t even met them. To make things worse, due to the nature of this profession, the parties are often located in different countries, which makes it practically impossible to use any legal avenues for retrieving your hard-earned cash. This post outlines our point of view on these fears and experience with non-paying clients.

The most basic recommendation is that a translator or translation agency should carefully consider any request from a new client by using common sense and performing due diligence, instead of rushing to accept the project. You can reduce your risk by examining the payment practices sites such as Proz.com’s Blue Board, researching this client on the Internet, requesting a contract and/or purchase order, etc. If anything seems too unhealthy to you, you can simply ignore the request. The risk is higher with larger jobs, so the best practice is to chunk them and receive payment for smaller portions of the job.

Looking at this matter from a business side, however, it’s all about risk-taking. Basically, if you want to secure new business, you must be prepared to take a risk. If you first priority is avoiding any risk, then you should probably turn down any “suspicious” offers and thus eliminate the undesirable risk altogether. Especially if you are a perfectionist, losing money might be just too frustrating for you. But if your first priority is securing new business at any cost, you perceive each new request as a business opportunity and are likely to take the risk. You know that even if you lose a few bucks, this loss is ultimately just a fraction of potential profits. The risk-to-reward ratio is strongly in your favor, and you can confidently follow the cliche: the greatest risk in life is not taking one.

Now, let’s look at how we followed these principles over the years. In fact, we didn’t receive payment for just two jobs:

1. The first one amounted to €20, and I guess the client just didn’t bother to pay due to the small amount. And we didn’t find it reasonable to pursue the client for the same reason.
2. The second loss was more substantial, over €500 for an English to Russian translation of an equipment catalog. The client simply kept ignoring our invoice. As we didn’t have any legal means to recover this amount, we also preferred not to chase the client and simply learn from this negative experience.

Although these two cases were admittedly frustrating, the percentage of losses relative to what we earned from taking the risk with other new clients makes the overall risk negligible. That is why it is our policy to trust any potential new clients and reduce the risk through a reasonable amount of due diligence.

You are also welcome to read this other post, which discusses other challenges that translators may face during their career.

Sending a translation request through a mass email, i.e. a non-personal email sent to several translators at a time, is a tool of last resort used by translation agencies in case of a very urgent job. Although effective and often reasonable, this is a very controversial practice, since more often than not it can be perceived as an impolite way of doing business. I would like to use this post to explain what we think about this kind of emails and share our experience with them.

The main problem with mass emails comes from the fact that many vendors (a) don’t like to be treated like a “commodity” and (b) don’t want to run the “whoever replies faster gets the project” race. A translator receiving such email will often delete it immediately, and if this kind of requests continue to arrive, they might even become irritated. That is why we never use such emails ourselves. Because we contact freelancers not too often, we enjoy long-term relationships with a limited number of English to Russian translators and won’t risk damaging these relationships. Also, most of our projects are not that urgent to call for aggressive email tactics. Even if we accept an urgent job (rarely), we prefer to process it in-house to have higher control over the translation process and avoid the risk of delay.

When we receive a mass email from an agency client ourselves, we treat it as a business opportunity, rather than an offensive practice. Focusing on the business side helps approach the request constructively and ignore the manner of contact. Yes, we very much enjoy and long for a personal touch, in particular because our line of work heavily relies on computers and provides little face-to-face contact with the customers. But it’s not as important as the level of customer service. As a translation company, our first and foremost goal is to serve our clients in the best possible manner, while also remaining profitable, which means that the clients always come first and any feelings should come second, if at all. In fact, the project manager contacting us with such request might be very busy at the moment, with dozens of other projects to assign on hand. Our job is therefore to simply evaluate this request just as any other project, assess our capability, and reply accordingly. There is even a chance that the law of reciprocity will work for you: after you handle several requests in the above-described positive fashion, you might be soon rewarded by a personal request from this project manager instead of a mass email.

Another issue about such emails is that whoever replies first usually gets the order, leaving all other respondents with empty hands. We also don’t have any problem with this. If the agency accepts our offer, that’s great. If not, what do we lose? Just the time spent on evaluating the request. But this is a normal expenditure required to run a translation business and happens all the time, so no big deal.

And the sweetest part is that through mass emails we received some of the most profitable projects so far. They often pay well because of the rush surcharge and compensation for additional services such as recreation of formatting due to uneditable source text.

And what is your opinion about mass emails? Are you inclined to delete them like many translators do? Or do you simply treat them as a business opportunity?

The more I pursue a career in translation, the more I realize that specialization is key to success in our industry. This post provides a few thoughts to back up this idea.

As quoted in Warren Buffett’s biography, he and Bill Gates believe that focus was the most important thing in getting them to where they were. I think this is true for our profession as well. By focusing on a limited number of areas of expertise, you get better in those areas and eventually become an expert in your field. On the contrary, when you spread yourself too thin by taking up whatever work comes your way, you can expect lower performance that is detrimental both to your image and bottom line.

Look at some of the successful translators of today, those who charge over $0.20 per source word. Judy and Dagmar Jenner, the authors of an insightful book, The Entrepreneurial Linguist, specialize in IT, legal, banking, finance, e-commerce, marketing, food, tourism, localization, business. This is a very focused selection without any areas that could strike as totally unrelated to the others such as healthcare, chemistry, or power engineering. Another example is Corinne McKay, a translator, author, and translation coach who works in as few areas as legal documents, international development, corporate communications, non-fiction books, and official documents. By focusing on those few areas, Mrs. McKay has been able to establish herself as an industry expert, while also having time and energy to pursue other endeavors, including writing and coaching.

As an editor, I see a huge gap between the translation produced by someone who understands (i.e. specializes in) the subject area and someone who hopes to get by on experience and intuition. To avoid mistranslations, the latter translator succumbs to general words or phrases, assuming those will definitely include the original meaning. Also, they have no other choice than translate literally, since they can’t improve the word-for-word translation (this is what a specialized translator normally does through better understanding of the subject area). Here is an example from a recent English to Russian translation:

Source: histological anomaly

Original literal translation: гистологическая аномалия

Suggested translation: новообразование, требующее гистологического исследования

Although it may sound fine at surface level, this word-for-word translation might be questionable under close scrutiny. First, it implies that “histological” is a property of the anomaly, while it is actually a method of studying the anomaly! Second, although the Russian word “anomaly” will be of course clear to the end users, it is hardly the word they would use themselves. This and other general or literal translations tend to be vague and oftentimes difficult to understand, causing an undesirable reaction in the end users such as frustration or laughter.

Let’s sum up the benefits of the power that lies within specialization:

1. The more focused you are in your areas of expertise, the better you get.
2. Specialization is practiced by some of the top people in our industry and translation agencies, so it might be a good idea to model their approach.
3. Remember that too general or literal translations might be useless to your clients and detrimental to your reputation.

I am sometimes asked about how Velior manages to maintain translation rates above the industry average in the highly competitive English to Russian language combination. I think the key to this is quality. You might say, “Wait a minute, you’ve just mentioned high competition, shouldn’t that drive quality across this combination?” You are right, of course, it should, but, judging by the translations I get to edit, it basically doesn’t. For this reason, a translator who puts quality first has a better chance of outdistancing competitors. So, which specific steps can you take to achieve this? From my experience as an editor who looked at several million translated words over the last five years, I can think of at least three main development areas for you to focus on:

1. Literal translation. Because English and Russian are extremely different, very few texts actually allow literal translation. In most cases, a literal translation is hard to read, unclear, and often ridiculous. Nevertheless, this kind of translation is commonplace in our combination. I hear two main explanations of why this happens, which both seem quite amusing to me. First, a translator often knows that the translation is poor, but just won’t do anything about it due to the lack of motivation, time, or skill. Second, many translators simply think this kind of translation will do, because they’ve always delivered this level of quality and got little or no feedback. Make it your job to never resort to literal translation, and you are on the fast lane on the road to success in your translation career!
2. Poor understanding of the source text. I strongly believe that understanding of the source text has a major impact on quality, but you might be surprised about how many translators think otherwise. It is not at all uncommon for people to translate without a clue as to what they are translating about. The bad news is that machine translation is evolving. One advantage of a human translator over MT is the ability to add value through better understanding of the text. Think about this: without this advantage, your translation becomes similar to MT output. As MT continues to evolve, human translators must invest more effort in understanding the text or be prepared to be put out of business. Change your direction today: instead of producing one vague translation after another, give more thought to what you write and look everything up on the Internet. Resolve to understand as much of the text as possible before committing it to your target segment.
3. Failure to use quality assurance tools. Although numerous tools, including free ApSIC Xbench and CheckMate, are available, many translations are delivered unchecked. In fact, one of our agency clients got so fed up with the errors, which can be easily detected automatically, that they put a special policy in place to discourage this kind of errors. This software became an integral part of our translation workflow long ago, since it improves quality and saves time otherwise spent on manual checks. Because I am so used to it now, I find it increasingly difficult to understand someone who doesn’t use translation environment tools on all or some of their projects. When I hear about this, my first thought is, “But this way you don’t get a bilingual text and can’t do automatic QA!” One of the best things about such tools is their simplicity—you can add them to your process easily and start benefiting from them almost immediately.

The actual process of evaluation against the metrics suggested in the 1st part of this post has its own challenges. One challenge is that an editor may incorrectly assume something to be wrong, particularly because normally the editor doesn’t have the same level of understanding of the source text as an original translator. To ensure no “false positives” are corrected during editing, it is important to get the original translator confirm potential errors and preferential changes.

Easy In-house Communication

Within Velior’s workflow that revolves around in-house translation, the editor simply sits down with the translator to go through suggested changes. The translator can challenge any suggestion and explain decisions behind the original translation. Although this process is much more time-consuming than simply letting the editor go ahead and edit the translation freely, we find it worth the cost, because we see a tangible payoff in quality and employee development. The organized effort of two people helps improve translation and reduce the risk of similar errors in the future.

Communication with Freelancers Requires More Effort

With freelance translators, this process can’t be applied easily for obvious reasons. In my experience, what usually happens is that a freelance translator is kept in the dark about the editor’s changes. For instance, read this post in the Medical Translation Insight blog by ForeignExchange Translations. This is the rule rather than the exception in our profession, which is quite understandable—communicating errors takes energy and resources, while offering little direct benefits to a translation agency.

Those agencies that do confirm the editor’s changes with the original translator typically have the editor compile a list of changes, ideally with explanations, and send this list to the translator for approval. The downside of this process is that it’s quite formal, and the translator often makes it their job to reject as many changes as possible, because their reputation with the agency is at stake (“Will they trust me with another job after seeing that this one was edited heavily?”). Unlike informal in-house dialogue, email-based communication also makes it more difficult for the freelance translator to explain why a specific translation was preferred over another. Devoid of human touch, a straightforward list of errors is likely to arouse resentment and defensiveness (“I did a perfect job, and they just mangled it!”). Compare this with a face-to-face conversation: when the translator actually hears suggestions directly from the editor who invites feedback and disagreement, the translator is in a better position to take criticism more positively, which results in adding value to the translation and learning from the errors.

Do you consider it important to communicate and confirm changes with an original translator? Is such communication worth the effort? What is the best way to confirm changes with a freelance translator?

We are now revamping the process Velior uses to evaluate all work produced by our translators. The ultimate goal is to make the metrics more effective in terms of employees’ development, while lightening evaluator’s task and ensuring more meaningful statistics are available for performance management.

There is a host of existing methods and opinions on this subject. For instance, a recent post by Corinne McKay mentions the classification of errors in certification tests used by the American Translators Association. While it is very detailed, which is probably driven by the need to achieve objective and specific evaluation, it might be too complicated for everyday use in a translation agency environment. My general idea for this environment is to keep the classification as short, and the categories as broad, as possible. This is a three-fold strategy. First, by allowing to map categories to main competencies, this strategy makes it easier for a translator to identify and focus on improving their weaknesses. Second, it provides an editor with a straightforward selection of categories for grading translations, preventing them from overthinking about which category an error belongs to. Finally, it plays a key role in managing employees’ performance, e.g. by providing meaningful statistics as to which jobs cause most problems and what training is necessary.

The refined system I am thinking of now will include five types of errors mapped to respective competencies:

1. Mistranslation: Knowledge of the source language
2. Inaccurate translation: Attention to detail and concentration
3. Style: General command of the target language
4. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation: Knowledge of the most basic language rules
5. Technical: Knowledge of translation technology and best practices, as well as disciplined thought

As mentioned above, one reason for such mapping is to make the translator aware of those competencies that should be on their development plan. The selected competencies are probably among the most important in our profession.

Another aspect of the evaluation process that I am trying to improve now is communication of the changes made by the editor to the translator. This aspect will be discussed in the next part of this post.

What evaluation process and metrics do you use to assess translation quality?

I am a great believer in free and open-source software as it lends itself to empowering people with the technology they need to be more efficient. The ability to use a free alternative instead of a commercial product can be of great value to any person or company, especially a small business like ours, which has to run a very lean operation in order to maintain competitive edge. When a major production tool in an industry is available for free, it is arguably a blessing to many people engaged in this industry. One of such tools in the translation industry is OmegaT.

Sometimes Intuition May Be Misleading

I first got my hands on OmegaT in 2009 and I must confess I wasn’t too impressed. I fell victim of what I now know was a snap judgment—the simplistic GUI and the philosophy that didn’t align with my previous experience with other translation environment tools (TEnTs) required a degree of flexibility I couldn’t come up with at that time.

A year later, I revisited OmegaT to actually rediscover it in a way that now makes me feel bad about the previous snap judgment. In this post, I want to share a few general thoughts based on my recent experience. What I mention here is just a tip of the iceberg, and I hope to be blogging more about this tool in the future as Velior continues using it in our translation projects.

How You Can Benefit from OmegaT

1. Packing all essential TEnT features, including project management, translation memories, and glossaries, into a single tool, OmegaT is a full-fledged translation environment software that provides a viable alternative to similar commercial products.
2. For a freelance translator who is just embarking on a journey to a career in this industry and doesn’t have the knowledge and/or money necessary to buy a commercial TEnT, OmegaT gives a strong helping hand. For instance, it might be a good starting point for those English to Russian translators who are building their translation business from the ground up or seeking cost-efficient ways to improve productivity and quality.
3. For an in-house translator, OmegaT gives the freedom of choice, making it possible to continue working on a project at home or using a laptop on the go just as easy as in the office.
4. Although SDL essentially discontinued development and support of the TTX format, it remains among the most common in the industry. This means that you need the commercial SDL Trados package to accept TTX-based projects and may be a potential roadblock limiting your availability to translation agencies. OmegaT, however, eliminates this barrier by allowing you to handle the TTX format, and many others for that matter.
5. Personally, I also enjoy the feeling of the community-based development process that is open to requests concerning bugs and new features. You can watch the software maturing and may even feel a sense of ownership in case you are somehow involved in the process.

What Limitations Need to Be Considered

Just as many other open-source initiatives, OmegaT carries a certain amount of limitations. Similarly, OpenOffice.org is arguably less sophisticated than Microsoft Office, and Ubuntu is less mature than Windows. Probably inherent to free software, such limitations are often minor in the sense that you can live with them if you make up your mind to do so. What matters most is your mindset—if your chief aim is to save wherever possible or you support free software philosophy in general, you are likely to be okay with the limitations, finding and using a temporary walkaround until they are fixed by the developers.

I am not exactly advocating for using OmegaT, because it is just one of the options available on the market, and it has its limitations. My point is that OmegaT is a valuable alternative to commercial products that can be considered by many translators, and I am happy with the freedom of choice it adds to our industry. Hats off to this project’s team for their enthusiasm!

Which free tools do you consider to be of great value in your work? Is OmegaT among them?

This post discusses translation challenges that involve words or phrases bearing a language-specific or culture-specific connotation, which cannot be easily rendered in the target text. Because a direct translation is undesirable or inappropriate, they require a more creative approach that considers context or audience. I will use examples (mainly from English to Russian translations) to generate a few ideas on how to approach some of this kind of challenges.

This city is not as huge as New York or even Los Angeles / Этот город не столь большой, как Москва или даже Санкт-Петербург

Here, both the challenge and the solution are simple. With the U.S. cities remaining in the translation, your comparison might not be immediately clear to your Russian-speaking audience. To avoid this, you can use similar Russian cities to get the message across.

SMART Goals / Цели SMART (Specific — конкретные, Measurable — измеримые, Attainable — достижимые, Realistic — реалистичные, Timely — с конкретным сроком)

This is a common word play challenge—acronym “SMART” has a dual meaning. In such cases, you can spend hours of time in search of a Russian equivalent to no avail. A more efficient option might be to keep the English acronym and translate each component in brackets. This way, the reader will be sure to understand the meaning of the acronym and might still enjoy the English word play. To make things easier, you can also provide a note explaining the nature of the word play.

Refer them to someone else who has the time—”No, but I’m sure Susan could help you with that“ / Учитесь направлять его к тому, кто располагает свободным временем: «Нет, но уверен, что в этом вам поможет Сьюзан»

Here, the choice whether to keep the English name, Susan, or replace it by a Russian name largely depends on context or audience.

It is important to consider the general feel of the text. In a text obviously coming from the English culture, a Russian name might feel alien. For this reason, in translations of fiction, the general tradition is to keep the proper names, even though they might be “eligible” for translation. For instance, one of the characters in Dombey and Son, Walter Gay (translation: Уолтер Гэй), is once humorously referred to as Walter Grave (Уолтер Грейв, not Уолтер Мрачный). This approach helps retain the original feel of the text. If you believe a translation will be also helpful, you can provide it as a note.

However, this approach isn’t universal. Where a text requires complete adaptation to the local audience needs, a direct translation might be more appropriate. Doing otherwise may signal that this text is a translation, causing your readers to smile or, even worse, frown, because this time it will be the English name that will feel alien.

In the above example taken from a training course designed for the Russian managers of a global company, I chose to keep the English name to retain the original cultural feel. Because the English language and culture are predominant in this company, the audience is likely to be okay with the English name.

A longer term strategy is to get a copy of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, a simple guide to grammar / Более полезным в долгосрочной перспективе способом будет изучение книги The Elements of Style [...], которая представляет собой доступное руководство по грамматике. Эта книга предназначена для пишущих на английском языке; аналогичные руководства существуют и для русского языка

This sentence comes from a text about developing your writing skills. Although this text was originally written with English in mind, it also applies to Russian and can be translated successfully. This very sentence, however, refers to a guide that is specific to the English language. It is clearly of little use to the mainstream Russian-speaking audience. Moreover, it represents a risk of confusing the audience. You cannot simply omit the English title though, at least because some of the readers might still find it helpful (again, it is the question of understanding your audience). One method to handle such cases is to keep the English title in your translation, but add a note saying that this is an English-based guide, while similar Russian guides are also available. You can also go an extra mile by including the titles of such guides.

Der Kupplungsservo wandelt den [Pedalweg/pedalweg ] um… / Усилитель привода сцепления преобразует [Ход педали/ход педали]…

Included in a technical questionnaire (translated from German to Russian), this sentence offers a choice of two options in the square brackets. As you can see, the options are the same, save for the case. The difference is purely grammatical—the version with capitalization is the correct one, since the first letter of any German noun is capitalized. But how do you render the German grammatical nuance in Russian, which doesn’t require this type of capitalization? Originally, I couldn’t come up with a better solution than to simply keep the capitalization in translation. It is of course not quite meaningful, because the choice of options may seem ridiculous in Russian. I still think though that the question here is really not how to translate, but why translate at all—why translate into another language a question that is specifically intended to test the knowledge of German grammar?

I will be delighted to know how you approach this type of linguistic challenges in your translations. Please feel free to share what works for you and what doesn’t in similar situations.

P.S. It is also my pleasure to wish a happy New Year to all readers of this blog and our clients.

An ongoing (long-term) translation project is a large job from the same client that comes in smaller portions on a regular basis over an extended period of time. To illustrate, an automotive company can produce user manuals, service manuals, software, and marketing content that all need translation into various languages. After initial translation, their updated versions may become available, and new materials can be also added in each category. All these types of content are sent for translation in subsequent batches that represent different parts of a single ongoing translation project.

As a translation company, we enjoy such projects for many reasons. First and foremost, this is an indirect sign of your client’s satisfaction. Even if a regular client never provides any direct feedback, you can assume they are satisfied with your services, judging by a steady workload.

Another positive aspect of ongoing projects is the stability they bring in terms of revenue and schedule. Just as any other repeat business, they represent a steady source of income, which is essential in translator’s profession that is prone to periods of little or no work (e.g. see this post by Serena Dorey). In addition to financial stability, such projects also increase your confidence in terms of your schedule. Your client often informs you in advance about any expected portions of their project, making it possible for you to plan ahead and balance your overall workload. You can therefore enjoy a piece of mind that comes with a well-planned schedule.

What I like about ongoing projects from a project manager’s perspective is their tendency to be more flexible deadline-wise. Because there is normally a streamlined, already optimized process in place, everyone is aware of how fast others can work, and files move around with little delay. Your client may be also willing to provide you with more time, instead of reserving that time for tackling any unforeseen problems, simply because little or no trouble is expected.

From a translator’s perspective, most ongoing projects are attractive too, because the longer you work on them, the better you know them. By gradually accumulating project-specific knowledge and expertise, you increase your understanding of this project’s subject matter and translate more efficiently. You can benefit from the accumulated knowledge even more by saving all information in a fashion that allows easy access in the future. For example, you can save previous source and reference files as PDF, merge them, and use the resulting single file to search for context or explanations. You can also maintain a translation memory and benefit from the ability to access older translations, resulting in increased speed and consistency. Therefore, with each new portion of a project, a translator’s job often becomes easier.

Could there be any drawbacks associated with ongoing projects? Hardly any. The only “downside” I can think of is the management challenges resulting from the requirement to always assign the same translator to a specific project, because otherwise quality and consistency may be reduced. First, no translator can be available at all times, because anyone can get sick, work on another project, go on vacation, etc. Second, an ongoing project places additional responsibility with any translator, as their client comes to depend on their availability. For example, if such translator is planning to go on vacation, they are expected to warn the client. The client might also have different plans and ask the translator to postpone vacation. Not everyone wants this kind of additional responsibility. Finally, when a new member such as an editor or proofreader is added to a project team, it’s not always easy to get them up to speed. Before fully understanding specifics and context of this project, they might be less efficient, e.g. make unnecessary or incorrect changes, resulting in additional rework time or even client’s complaints. But of course, these management challenges are minor as compared to advantages associated with ongoing large projects.

And what is your experience with this type of projects? We will be delighted to hear from you on this topic.