You have an important document to prepare. You have good people on board, and your team feel confident that they can handle both languages that the document has to be published in since they are all bilingual.
Instead of working in one language at the time, they split the document up into sections, and each team member works in the language they are most confident in, passing their sections on to the other team members for translation as they go.
Everything goes swimmingly. For a while.
They discover that each team member has a slightly different writing style. They create a “key” for the chosen terms that should be used regardless of language.
Everything swims again, the 400-metre butterfly victory is within reach, it seems. For a while.
They find that each of their two official languages have options that are not entirely self-evident. They decide to focus on one language at the time. However, as they have native speakers from different regions working on it, different styles sneak in despite their best efforts: date formats; single vs double quotation marks; full-stop or not after abbreviations; capitalisation in headlines; “en-dash” or “em-dash"; “-ize” or “-ise”-endings, should we use the singular "they"? – the list is surprisingly long.
There is slight panic spreading in the team. The working day grows ever longer, the weekends are swallowed up with work. Less than half the document has been translated, and the bits that have been done need to be adjusted to accommodate last-minute changes.
The decision to bring an external translator and proofreader onboard is finally made. They reassure their chosen linguist that most of the work has already been done and request a quote for a word-count that is several thousand words less than they end up handing over. Oh, and the deadline is five days away, weekend included.
Does this sound like a winning situation to you?
Not to me, either, but it has happened to me more than once. And each time it happens I promise myself that next time I shall NOT take the job. It is not worth the aggravation. But here goes, again, and here is my suggestion to you as a project leader:
That last point: if you do, the invoice will be an unpleasant surprise. We would much rather you were pleasantly surprised, wouldn’t we?
If you are shy about contacting someone at an early stage because you might not need them in the end – don’t be! It is much worse being contacted to sort out someone’s mess with no time to do it in, than to be asked for information and then not be used. Kudos to you and your team if you can manage without my help! But please have enough respect for both your own and my work to include me at the planning stage. After all, in our dog-eat-dog world, knowledge is power, and time is money! You save on the latter by acquiring the former.
The Business of English
Währinger Straße 15
1090 Wien, Austria
+43 676 5051487