|
tranfree issue 6 - 19 September 1999 Dealing With Busy CustomersBy Cathy Flick PhD Following on from issue 5, one more thought about dealing with busy project managers (or busy people in general). If you are faxing a list of questions concerning format, what exactly needs to be translated in an ambiguously marked text, etc., it helps to provide enough space after each question where the other person can just write yes, no, doesn't matter, etc. Tell them that you are doing this deliberately in the beginning of the fax, and ask them to just mark your fax and fax it back to you. This way they don't have to sit down and... Try to compose your questions in a way to make it easy to answer, avoiding convoluted sentences with multiple questions embedded in them. For example, you might have suggested answers
for a specific simple question. They can even just circle the one they want if it's in your list. If you are e-mailing a query to someone who definitely checks their e-mail frequently, be sure to put QUERY and the job number in the subject heading to draw their attention to it. It still helps to space out the questions, even though they can paste your original message into their reply. That helps them avoid overlooking an important question. Regardless of whether you fax or e-mail such queries, you should also tell them how you will do it if you don't get a response from them in time. This way, if they are really, really busy and how you say you will do it is fine with them or it just doesn't matter, or they know they can fix it at their end easily while processing the translation, they can safely delay responding. If it turns out they did want it done a different way -- well, at least you tried to get clearer instructions and they know it! A good question to ask a project manager on first contact is if they prefer getting such queries by e-mail or fax or both. If you're not sure, I would suggest both faxing and e-mailing (telling them that you are doing this in the beginning of the message), so they can choose their preferred way of responding. Sometimes an e-mail might be helpful because they can just forward it to another person's e-mail box for response, if everybody involved is an e-mail addict. But sometimes a fax is better, because they can just check off things and fax it back or just dump it physically on someone else's desk. Also some people just deal better with hardcopy than electronic messages, or vice-versa. My own feeling is that faxed or e-mail queries are less intrusive than phone calls, but that might be my own visual bias. I need to have things in writing myself just to be sure I understand them -- the only way I manage to deal with oral instructions is to take complete notes during the conversation, followed by a fax or e-mail to confirm that I heard it right. A friend once commented that I should beep periodically during a phone call like a telephone tape recorder -- this was after I quoted her own words to her from the earlier part of a phone conversation, from notes I was taking!
Cathy Flick has been a freelance scientific translator since
1978 (Ph.D. Chemical Physics, M.A. Physics, B.S. Chemistry).
Translates articles, books, and reports from Russian, French,
Italian, Spanish, and German into U.S. English in experimental
and theoretical chemistry and physics, pharmaceutical/biotech
areas, biophysics, geophysics. Click here to return to tranfree 6 main page
|
...
compose a response (saving them time) and you will get your answers much faster
(saving you time).