What your Project Manager is (probably) thinking

What your Project Manager is (probably) thinking

by Kimberlee Thorne-Waintraub (Owner of Small World Language Services, moderator of Quality Translation on Facebook, and wearer of many other hats)



Before I create any false expectations on this article, I want to make my own disclaimer before you read this. There is no way that my thoughts may be completely representative of any other Project Manager (hereafter "PM" or “PMs” in the plural form). However, based on my own experience doing this as my professional activity for many years, I would dare say that my opinion is not too far off from a fairly good view of what many other PMs think from time to time...



So here we go, in our attempt to get inside a PM's brain! Wish me luck…



Unless your direct client list is beating a well-trodden path from their location to yours, often breaking your door down, begging you to do language services for them that should have been delivered yesterday, chances you could use some of this helpful advice. However, if your door has been ripped apart and resembles your client's silhouette on it (like an episode from Cartoon Network), by all means, write ME back ASAP and give me your advice, which I will gladly take and run with it, not mentioning your name, for confidentiality sake!



If your path looks covered with snow (or leaves (plural of leaf) like mine), well then, let’s face it - your main income sources most likely come from at least one or two PMs (hopefully more) who represent a translation agency or another similar organization, or surprise, surprise, other translators like you…



And you are most likely considered one of their “resources”, meaning you are one of their “worker bees” or “soldiers”, as I prefer to call members of my wonderful linguist team, or as I am often found telling my people, “Carry on faithful soldier”, while encouraging someone to keep going at an odd hour of the morning, when most of the world in my parts of the Americas should be sleeping… After all, I'm the "queen bee” cracking that whip and the one who will be sending out their payment in the end, right?



Wrong! My collaborators are my partners, an extension of my own self and of the services I have to offer, and form a powerful fusion and force that when in action, is pretty unstoppable!



First of all, let me tell you who I am, and that means revealing myself at the personal level. I'm the owner of a small niche agency called Small World Language Services, whose services specialize in just 3 languages, English, Spanish and Portuguese. I’m originally from the United States, but I have lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina enough to say that my breakfast regularly consists of an Argentine drink called 'mate’ and ‘medialunas’ (croissants in English) and ‘dulce de leche’ (milk jam, coined by exporters from Argentina).



Another thing – I don’t have enough work to give everyone who reads this, simply due to the fact that my organization is still small, but we’re powerful because we work hard, believe in what we do and have great potential to grow more than what we have done in a year (200%)! We are currently among the top 5 on proz.com this year (2011), but it’s not because we’re the biggest agency out there. We’re just focusing on what we do best in the languages we can handle and aren’t interested in offering all the world’s languages and services that the others do.



Nevertheless, just because we won’t always get the chance to work together doesn’t make you any less valuable to me. On the contrary – my organization also does research on multicultural people, which guess what? If you’re a translator, project manager, traveler, expat, or similar, you fit the mold, and I want to get to know you too! Chances are your story could be on our “YouTube” channel someday if we’re able to establish a relationship of trust and make it happen.



I have learned some ways to keep clients coming back over the long-term, and believe me, I want and need my clients and if possible (which I know it is), I want and need more of them...



Nonetheless, I consider myself a dedicated linguist, project manager and excellent reviewer in English. I care about quality and I want anything entrusted to us to come out as impeccable as possible, and I try to do everything it takes to get the job done, and believe me, you don’t want to know what that has required so far…



This is what I’ve learned over the years about PMs, who, by the way, are perfectly normal people like any of us, but who have the role of being responsible for all the aspects of a project, which usually means it has been sold by a sales person, confirmed and accepted, handed over to a PM, who will then decide who gets put on each step of the project, what requirements are needed, within the budget constraints and deadline requested, oh, while pleasing the client along the way until the end, crossing their fingers and often praying that things will turn out well, meaning everyone will still have their hair and hasn’t killed anyone in the process...



Geez, that whole mini job description was exhausting in itself! And believe me, it is. A PM’s job is not easy at best. To the contrary, it’s a high stress job that few are capable of doing well and one that requires an attention to detail, good communication and you know what else? A good sense of humor! Yes, folks, can I tell you how important that has become? You have no idea how much...



This is something I learned from a very valued collaborator located on a sunny island located in the middle of the Caribbean. He knows who he is, but since he’s so good, I'm keeping his name top secret or he’ll get so many job offers that he’ll never be available for me ... But we have grown professionally together throughout the last few years, and he has been the perfect collaborator: trustworthy, good communicator, excellent team member, and does all this with an extremely eccentric sense of humor, even when he sends his invoices. He, along with his wonderful and loving partner in crime (his wife), who is also a great translator, make a great partnership and are people who I have learned to love and appreciate so much…



My wonderful collaborators have taught me how to be a more effective PM, better person and have blessed my life greatly in so many ways, gotten me some cool gifts from other places and some very delicious meals, by following these steps that could easily be named "The Top 10 top secret tips of Working in the Translation Industry":



1) Create a relationship of trust from the beginning. This goes for both sides. Can you yourself do the job well or not? You need to tell me the truth of what's going on with the project, any questions you may have, and if anything goes less than perfect, let's work together to try and make it better. Don't lie to me and tell me that you can do a job when you're lying in a hammock in the middle of the Bahamas, or put one of your substandard colleagues on the project instead of you. That creates mistrust and makes me think you’re only in this for the money, which by the way cannot be hidden once we do the Quality Assurance step… On the other hand, if you do a great job, you'll not only get paid for the first job, but you'll get repeat work from me, and probably lots of it...



2) Respond quickly to job offerings. The saying, “The early bird gets the worm" is so true. If you need to, invest in a mobile device that allows you to communicate quickly. Then be communicative throughout the project until the end. Please, don’t leave me hanging in the middle of a project wondering whether you’ve either been checked into the hospital or your private jet has been hijacked to the middle of some unnamed island that’s not even on the world or local map. Which leads me to my next point…



3) Communicate! Though an email, a phone call, a public computer, text message, mobile device, through someone else or smoke signals if necessary. As long as you can breathe, you can communicate somehow to me and let me know what’s going on with the project I've entrusted to you. I as a PM cannot fathom how you can just disappear off the face of the earth, unless you really did get sucked into the inner bowels of the earth, due to some natural disaster, i.e., an unforeseen circumstance has truly happened, which does happen once in a blue moon anyway, and those circumstances do happen. I just hope it doesn't happen while you're committed to one of my projects!



4) Make me remember you, but for good things. I've worked with so many people over the years, but unless we do a few successful projects together, I probably won't remember you and you'll get lost in the database. It's not on purpose! I'm probably the one missing out on your great services.



5) Be a flexible team player. We aren't always given the best budgets or deadlines to work with, and sometimes the jobs come trickling in instead of steady volume on a regular basis. We need people who can understand our clients’ needs. On the other hand, when better budgets are given to us, we'll be glad to pass that onto you since you're a real team player and we can count on you, and choose to reward you with a higher rate whenever possible.



6) When things go wrong, as they will at times, admit when you were wrong and the work wasn’t up to standard. This shows a PM maturity and responsibility on your part and demonstrates that you care about the quality of the work you’re delivering, and it can oftentimes recover a lost client. Ask them for the reviewed file, so you can check it yourself. You don’t prove anything to a PM by arguing that you were right and the work was in good shape, when it wasn’t… Help me resolve what’s not going right. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.



7) Be nice and don’t forget your manners. This is something I shouldn’t have to tell you, but as the world is getting more and more competitive and resources of all kind (food, money, oil, etc.) are getting scarcer, I cannot emphasize this enough. Be grateful for the work you get, and thank the people who give you work. After all, those people are our treasures and a means to make our dreams come true. They deserve to be treated well and yes, loved and pamperedJ



8) Show gratitude for the work received. I know what you’re thinking. She just said that, so why is she saying that again? This means thanking the person who gives you work, offering your services from time to time by saying you’re available and offering new services that can be in demand, and saying thank you for the payment. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Yes folks, this gesture can go a long way, believe me.



9) Be ethical and don’t contact or steal my clients. As a linguist, you are often entrusted with confidential or sensitive information. Do not betray this trust. Sooner or later, this will come back to haunt you. The Golden Rule: Do unto others what you'd have them do until you. and the reverse, Don't do unto others what you don’t want them to do until you. Enough said…



10) Find humor while doing work. Just this last weekend, while working on a very large rush job, a colleague of mine and I came up with the term "Vatman", which means “Very Accurate Translator” and "Vatmobile", which means my translator’s laptop. These are ways that I encourage my people to keep doing a good job and that also make them want to keep working with me while making a normally stressful job a bit more enjoyable…



I hope you’ve found this article helpful and a bit amusing. I welcome your comments and hope to get to know all of you over time through this group.







For more info, see our website at www.smallworldlanguages.net

Proz.com profile - http://www.proz.com/profile/77598



or Like us at our Facebook company page at http://tinyurl.com/4v3upb4





Small World Language Services is a corporate member of the ATA (American Translators Association).

Say Good-bye to Your Dragon Tattoo: Why Translation Still Does and Will Always Matter

YALE PRESS LOG

The importance of translation in bringing new books and ideas into English is crucial. Although no one has declared a universal language since Louis XIV, the dominance of English in international commerce, media, and even academia is impossible to ignore. Yet merely an estimated three percent of the hundreds of thousands of books published in the United States have been translated from non-English languages, and the volume of new, translated work from modern and contemporary writers is even less. Read more

HAPPY FRIENDSHIP DAY!

JULY 20th--- International Friendship Day!

It was originally promoted by Joyce Hall, the founder of Hallmark cards in 1919, however, it didn't stick in the United States. In South Asia it is widely celebrated, and I can speak personally that in Argentina it is an excuse to have a good party with friends.

Prior to visiting Argentina, I had never heard of Friendship Day, or as they say in Spanish "El Día del Amigo". Friends send text messages, meet up for dinner and drinks, and sometimes give small gifts to each other. Although I think it is a nice idea, celebrating a day for friends has never crossed my mind before. As it is, we are with friends every chance we get. They are the people we chose to share our lives with outside of our families. But I am left thinking that there is no harm in having a day to reflect on all the great people you have in your life and enjoy a few more good moments together.

I wonder why it faded in the United States. Perhaps it is because we already have enough Hallmark days as it is.

TRANSLATIONS GONE WRONG

It seems simple enough. You can enter the phrase into an online translator, use a dictionary, or what you learned in grade school. Companies and businesses translate greetings, directions, and warnings to deliver important messages to people of other languages and countries. The intention to connect and bridge communication gaps is present, however, it is blemished and marked with humor and lack of professionalism.

We can laugh or gasp at a sign that is poorly translation, be forgiving of their errors, but it's a shame that their good intention and the real meaning is lost in the translation.

Have a good laugh at these signs, but let's make sure we do it right!



Photo by: Drpoulette(*)
Photo taken of a sign at a restaurant in Mexico.














Photo by: djrue













Buzzandthecity.com

New Services added to our company!

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to let you know that we've just partnered up with a voiceover (VO) provider that can not only handle your voice over projects in several languages, but also write your scripts.

This is a new offering for us, and we're very excited to do it.

For any information, see our website at www.smallworldlanguages.net or write us at info@smallworldlanguages.net

Kimberlee Thorne-Waintraub
Owner

Small World Language Services: "Captain's Log," Stardate February 24, 2011

Small World Language Services: "Captain's Log," Stardate February 24, 2011

"Captain's Log," Stardate February 24, 2011

I logged onto the Internet tonight to see that the space shuttle Discovery had taken its final flight into space this morning. I clearly remember the first time a shuttle was launched into space and returned safely. I was in junior high school, in my science class, of all places, and our teacher, an aging man (who died later that year), set up a television set and we watched a replay of the launch which had occurred two days earlier, then watched, live, Columbia's flawless landing. It was a thrilling start to a new age in space exploration in which a manned space craft could actually return to earth in the beautiful and majestic form of a giant gliding aircraft with wings, and return to space again! I had remembered the test flight of the Enterprise shuttle four years earlier, before I had reached puberty and was steeped in the then brand new Star Wars phenomenon of that same summer. I would not have yet received my first Star Wars action figures or miniature Millenium Falcon ship or Star Destroyer until later that November for my birthday, or December for Christmas. Everything seemed to be about outer space and discovery in the summer of 1977, and would continue to be for some time, as far as I was concerned. My best friend of the time and I obsessively used to build spaceships out of Lego's in our pre-adolescent days (before they came pre-designed, with instructions, like today!), and moonbases resembling the moonbase on the futuristic television show Space: 1999 (which seemed impossibly distant in the future at the time). NASA's test shuttle Enterprise had even been named after the television series Star Trek's USS Starship Enterprise. A lifetime would feel like it had passed between the ages of 10 and 14, between Enterprise's piggy-back ride on a 747, its successful glider landing, and Columbia's historic launch into orbit and safe return through the blazing heat of free-fall re-entry in 1981.

Now, here I am in 2011 watching a replay of Discovery's final launch over this thing called the Internet (the PC was not even a household item yet in 1981!), and I feel as if another lifetime has passed since that day in my junior high school science classroom.

I felt moved as I watched Discovery's final ascent, while listening to the oddly comforting rumble of its rocket boosters escorting the shuttle to serve its final mission of "Discovery."

I watched as the camera mounted to the fuel tank showed a curving horizon, framed by an inky black and its accompanying "no-sound"...complete silence even in the separation of the fuel tank from the shuttle--as if it had moved beyond the physical world, like a reincarnated being finally breaking free from its cycle of mortality and arriving at last at Nirvana, and sending us back a transmission of what it saw...earth as one body, one spherical volume of molten core; cliff- and canyon-carved crust; colonies of ants working tirelessly, their labors riding piggy-back, as they march toward ant hills and underground ant civilizations; humans moving like ants across and through one another on city streets and avenues in New York, Shanghai, Riyadh and Buenos Aires; sprawling, automated sprinkler systems watering squares, rectangles, and circles of world crops, too far away to see from this altitude, but contemplatable through eyes of thousands of civilians peering down from passenger windows suspended somewhere between Discovery and earth at this very moment--and this morning, in the moment that two of those eyes might have been caught off guard by a vertical plume of smoke rising into the air appearing in the horizon, rising higher, above you, through the cirrus clouds, then melting into the stratosphere. And it dawns on you, this Thursday morning, that most people have never peered into the abyss of blue beneath you or beyond the darkening hues of cobalt above you.

But look--and go--NASA did.

When Discovery returns, she will return as a body, as the shell of Discovery's spirit, accompanied by pall bearer jets; but Discovery's spirit will remain "up there" with the dreams and reachings of humankind, who shall build more, and better space crafts to take us into space, to constantly move us closer and closer to unity with the mind of God, to "universe-"al knowledge.

Watching her disappear into the ether, as even the most advanced ground cameras struggled to keep her sight in their digitally-exacting motion-steadying eye pieces, was like watching the spirit of a loved one slowly slipping away from you in their final moments of dying, when you know they have moved beyond the point of no return and are already there in spirit even before their hearts have stopped and the spirit has left the body. It was like saying goodbye to someone I'd known for a very long time and for whom I'd grown to feel great affection over the years....

Discovery has not returned from space yet. But right now, I know she's up there floating, probably belly up, like I used to do in the ocean in the summers on beaches in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine; feeling weightless, disembodied from the cares of the world, a chasmic depth of mystery beneath me and a domeless, infinite blue above me. I even remember floating on a quietly bobbing sea at night one time, staring at the stars, as the shuttle crew must find itself doing every now and then on their missions.

When Shuttle Discovery's body is "shuttled" home by two or more pallbearing fighter jets, I will greet her with flowers and a kiss on the cheek, where those tiles burned each time in a trial by fire--a trial necessary for her to go through each time she returned with new knowledge, and new Discoveries to share with all of humankind.

Not every trial has been perfect. The original Columbia, seen in her maiden voyage from my junior high science class, was not able to share with us the fruits of her last labors in February of 2003. I was well into my 30's when damaged wing tiles did not withstand the intense heat upon re-entry. Columbia, our beloved original, would be no more. Challenger's accident found fault in the opposite--freezing temperatures, blamed for leaking O-ring joints in the shuttle boosters two minutes into lift-off, in January of 1986.

Did you know that if the earth were to attempt to cozy just a smidgeon closer to the sun, toward the trajectory of Venus, that we would not survive the heat; or that if we were nudged just so much further way from the sun, closer to the orbit of Mars, we would all freeze to death?

Our planet and our dreams hang in a fine balance between exuberant ecstasy and catastrophe. Thankfully, we do not have to worry about the Earth's general safety in a universe of Newtonian physics governing, so elegantly, the motion of the planets and stars; but we humans, the one imperfect creature in this universe--though paradoxically the most "advanced" that we know of--must experience trial and error in our Endeavor to reach for the stars, and trial and error to reach below, toward the source of mythology's Atlantis, into the depths of the sea (which covers more territory than Earths' dry land!).

One more matter before logging out of this "Captains Log" (in my dreams!), Stardate Feb. 24, 2011... I cannot look over one remaining detail: the role my father played in the space program. Dad worked for the original Morton Thiokol Corporation which built the space shuttle boosters, which have been escorting the shuttle into space for these last three decades. I remember accompanying my grade school class on a field trip to observe a shuttle booster test before Columbia's inaugural launch. Many of us had parents who worked for Thiokol. The mother of my best friend from 5th grade through high school was a telephone operator there. The booster was mounted firmly to the earth and the propulsion from the booster was blasted onto the desert hill side, which I remember turned black as soot. The sound was thunderous, unlike anything I had ever heard. I imagine we were much closer to the booster than viewers are allowed to stand to the shuttle when she launches from Kennedy Space Center.

When the Challenger "slipped the surly bonds of Earth" years later and blame for the accident was pinpointed, I remembered back to that day and wished, as I'm sure much of my home town did, that we could have done something to reverse the sorrow brought upon her crew's families and upon the entire nation, whose very dreams and hopes were symbolized in the ambition of the shuttle program. Only five years had passed since the first shuttle launch. Mistakes were made in making decisions about whether to fly or not. The danger was debated, but those who insisted on flying, like those who insisted on taking the Titanic full speed ahead, won out. Improvements were made in the O-ring design before the next shuttle was allowed to launch, and in the 25 years since then, the space shuttle boosters have successfully carried all five shuttles dozens of times into orbit without failure. Which reminds me: Twenty-five years is exactly half the time my dad worked as an employee for the Thiokol/ATK company, becoming the organization's longest serving employee in its history.

Nearly everything that my dad earned to give me a life free of want at the dinner table, filled with opportunities in music and education, and a modest weekly allowance so that I could go see The Empire Strikes Back, Disney's The Black Hole, or the latest incarnation of Spock's ears for the umpteenth time came from the place that courted and escorted all of our shuttle missions into space.

Thank you for your missions of discovery over the years...Columbia, Challenger, Endeavor, Atlantis,...Discovery. And thank you, Dad.



Copyright Aaron Jensen 2011


Discovery's final launch - February 24, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPkJ8ugK3_0
First shuttle test flight - Enterprise - February 18, 1977
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I8DZivcnMM

First shuttle launch - Columbia - April 12, 1981
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_PUF7DiKp8

Newtonian physics applied to the space shuttle in orbit (Thank you, Isaac Newton! b. 1642, d. 1727)
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/spacecraft/q0164.shtml

Why does the space shuttle fly belly up in space?
http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae524.cfm