Mistakes We’ve Made (and what we’ve learned)

All organizations make mistakes of one kind or another. Learning from mistakes is important to ensure we grow and improve as a company. In most cases the marketplace does reward competency in the long term.

Lessons we’ve learned from past mistakes include:

1) It’s better to forego a project than promise a delivery schedule that’s unrealistic (or too stressful)

No company likes to disappoint a client by declining a project, or to pass up on business, and we’re no exception. Still when a client’s schedule objective is unrealistic or is too tight to ensure a high quality outcome, foregoing a project might just be the thing to do. When we do commit to a project schedule we do so with high confidence of not only delivering on time, but with high quality.

2) There are no unimportant or easy translation projects

Small projects are just as important and require proportionately just as much attention to quality control as larger ones. Clients sometimes agonize over the creation of smaller bodies of text more than large volumes. So no text for translation is trivial nor undeserving of its due attention.

3) Never (ever) mention the words “Google Translate” to a client (even if they bring it up)

Clients still occasionally ask us about Google Translate and sometimes even question the accuracy of a professional translator’s translation when it doesn’t correlate exactly with the output of an online translator (such as Google Translate, which of course we don’t mention). Machine translation may have its place (just not in our company’s work), but its output is not at the level of high quality human translation performed by skilled linguists.

 

See also:  Translation Services Buyer’s Guide