Ccaps Blog

Although we spend most of our days dealing with projects that need to be translated from English, the jargon we use in our work often remain as is.

PM stands for Project Manager, a very well known figure in companies that develop some kind of project, such as IT, oil platform and so on.

LPM is almost the same as PM, only it stands for Local Project Manager, the person who receives the project information from the GPM. He is the bridge between translators, reviewers, editors and the GPM, who in turn interfaces with the client.

The GPM acronym is a recent addition to my professional vocabulary. I was introduced to it when I entered a translation company to work as a project manager and was told that I would work as a GPM (“All right then,” I thought to myself

It stands for Global Project Manager; the person responsible for managing projects whose source language is a foreign language and the target language or languages may include the GPM’s mother tongue or not.

Heads up, as the name indicates, is an indication that you should “lift your head up” and be attentive for what is to come. It means that a project is ready to go; it has been quoted and the client is negotiating prices and deadlines. Therefore, there is a great chance of its being officially approved.

When you as a GPM have to send a heads up email, I suggest to include the following:

1) the project’s subject matter and the client name
2) languages involved
3) approximate number of words
4) application to be used in the translation process
5) request to confirm the e-mail of the person in charge of the work
6) estimated handoff date and desired turnaround

The handoff is the actual delivery of the project with the files to be translated, edited or localized. It works as if it is coming out of the GPM’s hands and going straight to the LPM. In this process, however, the responsibility for the success of the project still depends on the GPM, who must have control over the entire lifecycle of the project’.

Speaking of which, let me go back to my PM activities…

There is an upcoming project designed by the government of the State of Rio de Janeiro to implement free Wi-Fi network all over the city. This will certainly make the technology very popular. The project will begin in the neighborhood of Copacabana and eventually extend to Baixada Fluminense. The government expects that the whole state will have Wi-Fi coverage within 18 months.

Sure, this is a great option to make Internet access popular and democratic, but we should never forget about security issues! Data traveling through air (in wireless networks) can be easily intercepted or accessed. So, if you plan to use the public wireless network, make sure you have some encryption system in place to protect your data and avoid unpleasant surprises…

How can a bride-to-be, who schedules her very “big day” sometimes one year early, arrive late at her own wedding? All of them have good reasons to justify the delay, and they usually blame the hairdresser, the make-up artist, the dress, the limo driver – anything.

It doesn’t matter that the date is set with some 300 days in advance; if you don’t have proper planning and tight supervision to make sure the schedule is followed, the bride will probably have a lot of people waiting for her.

But what’s translation got to do with all this?

Corporate life works the same way. The R&D department decides that a product is ready and sets a date to launch it. If this schedule is not carefully followed though, every deadline will be missed and when you realize, the delivery date (which seemed so reasonable…) will be impossible to meet.

It is fine if you can reschedule the date to launch the product, but this is not usually the case. It has to be strictly followed and, to make it happen the only solution is to shorten the timeframes in between.

Translation is generally the last step of the process and each time a deadline is missed, there is less time to translate. The result? The work that could be impeccably done by a focused team of translators and reviewers will now require a team with twice as many people. These will have to work it out to meet the deadline required by the client, and the balance between quality, price and turnaround will be seriously compromised.

Dear client, the next time you decide to reduce the previously established translation deadline, think about the bride. Can you imagine if she had to go through the beauty marathon on her wedding day with 2 make-up artists (one for each side of her face), 3 hairdressers, 5 limo drivers and so on? The bride certainly doesn’t want that and neither does your product. When you give us the time necessary to complete the work with the quality you deserve, your product (and the bride!) appreciate it.

PS: No, I did not arrive late for my wedding. I was right on time but had to wait for half an hour inside the car! The priest had missed the deadline…

The odds of obtaining high quality Portuguese to English translation made by a non-native speaker are low and risks are high. We all know that a translator does not need to be a native speaker to deliver a quality job. I say this because, to be a translator, being native is not enough – it is a profession that requires experience, for this is the key to achieve quality. We also know that experience is not acquired overnight, but with years of reading, dedication and research.

A foreigner can speak very well Portuguese language and so can we when it comes to a foreign language, but there will always be differences in writing that are bound to be ignored and that we could never notice in a foreign language.

To translate is to communicate, and the translator must understand the concept of the text to reproduce it in the most adequate way in the target language. To understand the concept all that you need is advanced knowledge, but to communicate the idea it almost mandatory to be a native speaker.

This is why we only use native speakers for our translation. One should never play with quality after all!

In the world we live in, professional and personal communication is more and more confined to technology tools like Outlook, Messenger, Skype and others. But how do we establish priorities when it comes to the amount of time we take to answer our messages? In other words, whom should we answer first?

• To the Messenger window that insists on flashing whenever we are busy with another task
• To the email message that appears on the bottom left corner of our screen and make us forget what we are doing at the moment to rush back to Outlook
• Or to the voice or text request received on Skype?

I have friends who prefer not to connect to MSN or even to use the “Appear Offline” status so that they only communicate with people they want to, and avoid acquaintances and friends who insist on rambling on and on about their plans for the following weekend, even though they can see onscreen status is set to “Busy.”

Because I need some degree of organization to take care of my daily tasks, I would really like to put aside the Windows multitasking way of thinking and take the proper time to do each thing separately. Finish one task to start the next.

In other words, as a personal goal for 2008, I would like to be less tempted to stop what I am doing (writing this post, for instance) and run to read the message that entered my inbox.

On the other hand, today’s professional has to be increasingly versatile and resourceful. He or she is expected to perform lots of tasks at the same time, yet any limitation to the contrary (including delayed responses) can be seen as failure.

I also agree that vitamin C and flexibility always come in handy, for the emails that arrive while you are busy with something may have priority over that other task.

On your daily activities, while checking your personal or professional email, I would suggest the following steps:

1) Quickly browse through all your messages
2) Flag each message with a color (a feature available in MS Outlook). You can use red for emails that require your urgent attention and lighter colors for those that can be handled later. You can also flag pending emails that depend on the answer from someone else or those ones that require information not yet available
3) Read your emails again according to the order of priority you established
4) Then respond to those messages for which you have all the necessary information and file them in the subfolders created under your Inbox

A safe way of filing and searching for information of past projects is to create a .pst file for each project, and separate them by stakeholder. These .pst files are filed in the company’s server and this will allow anyone to search, for example, in the emails to a Project Manager the answer or solution for a certain problem. If not all stakeholders are able to file their emails like this, at least the PM should follow this advice.

To translate websites, software or some other file formats is quite different from the translation of standard documents due to one important feature: the use of tags.

Working on a document with tags requires experience and attention. The simple act of adding or removing a space before or after a tag may generate errors in the final file, and switching the position of any two tags may be enough to make it impossible to convert the file back.

How do these problems occur? In general, there are two main reasons for that:

1) The way Trados (or any other CAT tool) is configured.

If tag penalty is 0%, the program will assume that the string “The <b>Book</b> is on the table” in your document is exactly the same as the string “The <i>Book</i> is on the table”, which was previously stored in TM. This change from bold to italics will cause the error.

2) TM fuzzy

During the translation process, you can have the following string:

“The <b>Book</b> is on the table”

However, Trados suggests the following string:

“The <i>Cat</i> is on the table”

and informs you that TM leveraging is 80%. In a rush, the translator replaces “Cat” with “Book” and does not notice that the bold tag was changed to italics.

This case is even worse than the first one. To check and fix them, one should rely on how experienced and attentive the translator is. Tag verification programs can be helpful, but are not always reliable, often take a long time to run and provide frequently irrelevant results, discouraging the use.

This is why as an engineer one should be totally focused and have sharp eyes to detect such potential problems.