Project Management
When you think about translators, what do you imagine? Do you see a linguist in a dusty library, huddling over a Latin manuscript, struggling to find a better equivalent to a certain word or phrase? On the one hand, you are right. This is one traditional side of a translator’s working environment. On the other hand, the past decade has seen translation moving far beyond the realm of printed documents into software, websites, databases, and multimedia content. The reason for such changes is the digital revolution, which has given rise to the concept and practice of localization.
Today translation is not just a service but a whole industry based on team work, use of the corpus, and informational technologies. The translator needs to develop the skills of a project manager, a computer scientist, a documentalist, an evaluator, a localizer, and a technical writer. In our current international environment, translation agencies now work on massive, multilingual projects. This has made it essential to rely on project managers, who have become an integral part of the translation agency’s workflow as they coordinate the skills, needs, and expertise of multiple resources. Translators and other industry professionals have to work cross-culturally, and professional teams are often geographically distributed. Translators’ working process has to be somehow supervised, and this is where the project manager comes into play.
Translation agencies do not perform translation; their main goal is to coordinate translators’ work and to make sure that that translation and localization projects awarded to them by clients are completed on time, within budget and according to the client’s requirements. The translation part of the project is the most important one; however, it can be successful only when other phases of the project have been planned and satisfactorily completed. During this phase team members share resources and information, and a project manager’s task is to organize the work: making a detailed calculation of project costs and profits for the agency, testing and assuring quality, communicating with clients, and so on.
Thus, for translation agencies that work across sectors and geographical borders, project management is crucial as it controls spending, improves project results, and helps companies remain competitive on the domestic and international markets.
At LingoStar, we employ seasoned project managers to organize our work, manage tasks, and achieve the best results. We cooperate with professional translators all over the world who can provide translation and localization services in over 100 languages. Call us today at 604-629-8420 or send us an email at info@lingo-star.com for more information!
