Project management in translations

Translation project fits project management methodology nicely. Translation delivers a unique product and is a temporary envour. Project management is about coordination, teamwork, planning, and control techniques.

Many factors interacting in the translation process, project management emerges as the key element marrying crafts, needs, and expertise. Translation teams share data, clients, targets, projects, people, and resources, and it is the task of project managers to plan, instruct, monitor, and control large amounts of data quickly and accurately, while facilitating the problem-solving and decision-making process.

A translation project's life-cycle begins with a Request for Quotation and commissioning. At this point, the project manager receives a bid for translating a particular item (some CAD drawings, user manuals, specifications, instruction leaflet, a web site, etc.), and the immediate action is to define client's needs, evaluate internal and external constraints that may affect the project's life cycle, and evaluate alternatives and options. This is usually known as the feasibility study and its main purpose is to gather information on all parties interested in the project - the stakeholders - so that the project manager has a clear idea of the environment where the project will evolve and how those affect the latter.

In the process of preparing the feasibility study, it is the project manager's task to inquire about the following:

• Once project and stakeholder's requirements are formalised, the next stage in a translation project life-cycle is planning. An essential aspect that needs to be kept in mind at all times is that the project is a whole, from conception to delivery, and that all interrelated activities leading to completing the project must be perfectly identified and carefully planned, to the extent that later, during project development, everyone participating considers the previous and subsequent steps as part of the overall workflow. Since the project has a specific start and a finish, a budget, and a set of tasks to be performed by a number of people in a certain time period using different resources, the project manager has to devise a coherent plan where all these items are adequately coordinated.
• One of the first steps in planning is to identify key objectives and decide how to achieve them. The best way to proceed is by breaking up the path leading to the objectives into work packages and from these, decide who is responsible for performing each, assign lines of responsibility, level of authority, and lines of communication inside and outside the WP. Each WP has other elements, aside from people, associated to it: work calendars, resources, key dates, budget, quality control, and reporting frequency. Finally, each WP produces a deliverable (a subject specific glossary, the alignment of two files, a draft version of the translation) which is either the input to the next WP or contributes directly to one of the key objectives. A carefully devised plan will allow for the efficient completion of the project and will also facilitate the manager's job if any readjustments are needed in terms of time, people or budget.
• One of the important items in the project management for Translations is to keep a common dictionary. As some projects may involve several translators working on the same subject, hence it is very improtant to maintain and to manage a shared list of accepted terms and definitions.

With good project management, scalability should be considered so that the translation does not have to be rebuilt every time our client calls. The elements to be considered are, for example, new formats for old translations, new communication means with the client, new standards to be applied, new technology to be used in the translation process, new team distribution (some of the translators may choose to work freelance or in-house). Only with an efficient plan incorporating a flexible structure and a suitable operational environment can the translation project be successfully carried out.