Business Management

Finding job opportunities in the translation industry.

Combining transferable skills with knowledge acquired through training leads to marketable assets and greater success in finding the right job in a growing business.

This lesson is about the system for keeping track of clients and projects, tasks undertaken, target languages and countries.

You need to get a handle on the project from the outset. Gather as much information as you can about your client's requirements and expectations.

In this lesson you are given information about localization.

This lecture describes the process for determining the feasibility of undertaking the project. One of your key considerations in deciding whether a project is feasible or not is to analyze your possibilities for finding qualified translators and other team members for a specific target language.

For example, if you are being asked to translate a document from English into Norwegian, you need to know whether or not you have access to qualified translators for the target language and for the subject matter at hand.

Likewise, you need to determine whether or not these candidates are offering their services at a rate you can afford to pay. You may have to adjust your quote to the client to take into account any additional cost you may have to incur.

A particularly difficult scenario is one in which you can't find a translator who is qualified to translate into Norwegian for a document on nuclear energy (for example); you may need to consider getting a "draft translation" and then having it reviewed by a native Norwegian speaker who in fact hold a university degree in nuclear energy so that this latter person can edit the translation and produce an acceptable product. You will be encountering additional costs and you may also have to adjust your schedule and extend the deadline for this target language.

Your job here is to familiarize yourself with terminology management software and generate multilingual glossaries for the project's target languages, based either on similar documents translated previously and made available by the client, or on input from your translators and proofreaders, along with feedback from the client if at all possible. We indicate the relationship between end dates and start dates for tasks, and the on-going nature of making assignments.

This is a key step to producing translations that will be acceptable to the client.

In this lecture you will learn about the tools used by translators, proofreaders and localizers. 

Quality is of utmost importance. Support your choice of technical terms and phrases using a rating system.

In this lecture you will learn about turnaround times as they relate to the volume of text to be translated, timeframes for proofreading and other tasks.

You'll learn how much a translator can translate within a given period of time; how long it takes to proofread a text; and scheduling techniques.

Procedures for making assignments will be discussed and the need to calculate costs at the start of the project based on reliable estimates of fees charged by team members.

The quality of the translation is vital to the success of the project and that quality will depend to a large extent upon the effort put into managing terminology for the target languages.

You will learn how to manage schedules and monitor job progress by identifying milestones.

Here you will analyze the results achieved and the problems encountered, with a discussion of how to resolve issues that arise during the course of the project.

This lesson provides a 2nd project for study and analysis.

A word on job offerings.

An explanation of the Knowledge Base.

Sources: Wikipedia, Dan Marion