I am a translation project co-ordinator and I hate my job.
Granted, my experience is in the translation industry is limited: I have only worked at this one translation agency. However, I can say that translation project management sucks. It is a sucky job in a sucky industry. To illustrate this suckiness, let me take you through 48 hours in the life of a struggling translation agency.
Mid-week we received an urgent enquiry from a newish client. Can we translate 100 words into Swedish and Finnish? They need it by the end of play. So my colleague starts contacting translators. She calls, she emails. Finally we find one Swedish and one Finnish translator. The Finnish translator has time, but she wants to see the source text. My colleague says it’s just a price list, nothing complicated. But the translator wants to see the source text. The translator phones back. She has questions. She can do the job though.
So we send a quote to the client. By now it is 4 pm. The client goes quiet. My colleague tries to reach by phone but is told to call back in 5 minutes. My colleague and I are completely annoyed and questioning whether the job really was so urgent.
At 4:55 pm I phone, ready to give the client a piece of my mind. She is unable to reach the end client to get cost approval.
“It’s nearly 5 pm. I can’t guarantee delivery for close of business anymore. If you phone back in 5 minutes, we’ll see what we can do.”
10 minutes pass. No word. My colleague emails the client to say that we can’t deliver today, but if they give us go-ahead, we will provide the translation tomorrow.
The next day
We have a go-ahead. We are told to liaise directly with the end client, as our client is in a meeting all day.
I contact the translators. Our Finnish translator has lots of questions. Really annoying questions. Questions so petty that I cannot even think of them. Questions like should there be a full stop at the end of this line, because apparently this makes a difference in Finnish. The answers, of course, have to be relayed to her colleague in Sweden, who seems to be responding increasingly more dryly to these needless clarifications.
Finland wants to see a layout. I feel like screaming: “It’s a sodding price list. What difference can the layout make?” But I ask the end client if we can see a mock-up. The end client is obviously not so impressed. But she mocks something up in Word – it is a complete mess, but it seems to satisfy my Finnish translator.
I deliver to the end client, copying in my client, of course.
I close the job, but oh that’s too soon. Because according to the end client, I have not followed her instructions. I look back through my email correspondence with her and can see nothing resembling instructions. Nothing resembling a “by the way, you have to translate the amended copy instead”.
I seek clarification. It turns out that, even though the mock-up did not bear much resemble to our brief and contained a whole lot of copy we weren’t asked to translate, I was somehow supposed to telepathically deduce from it that we needed to translate an extra line.
Free of charge, of course.
That goes without saying – because how am I supposed to tell the end client that a late copy change costs £50 per language ? I could go on and on, because the saga does not end there. By the end of the day, I hate
1) our client for washing her hands of this mess
2) the end client simply for being a b*tch
3) the Finnish translator for asking too many pointless questions – if the source is ambiguous, just make the target ambiguous too, right?
4) the world
There is zero job satisfaction in any of this. And the job was worth less than £150.
