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tranfree issue 16 - 7th July 2000
Do You Play PowerPoint?By Alex Eames I don't know about you, but sometimes you just get one of those jobs from hell that everything works out the worst possible way and you wish you'd never taken. We had one such job this week where the actual word count was about 400 words. The job took pretty-much all day. We would normally expect to get a couple of thousand words worth of work done in that time. But this job was different
So it took a lot of time to actually change all these embedded items. Not only this, but it was one of those horrible presentations where the client used all their own in-house terminology without providing a glossary. So you're forced to 'invent' or guess terms in the target language to give equivalents for their corporate bull****. In fact it helped us to have enough strength to make a new policy decision. "We don't do PowerPoint any more!" or if a good client manages to persuade us to take a PowerPoint job, we'll be charging by the hour for it at our full hourly proofing rates. For the job which took 6 hours for 400 words, we would have tripled our fee to a more reasonable hourly rate. The trouble is, it was for a very good client, who we like and respect and enjoy working with. Sometimes you just have to get on with it in the name of good client relations. But you do have to draw the line somewhere, even with your best clients. As long as you explain it nicely and well you should be OK and everything will work out. This client now knows we don't accept PowerPoint in future. They've written it on our card. All future PowerPoint work goes to someone else - PHEW! You can't be all things to all people. You've got to try and...
You need to keep clients happy - but do draw a line and stick to it, or you'll go mental and be forced to leave aside work which is more important or more lucrative. You have to make tough business decisions. It's very difficult turning down work of any kind, but sometimes you just have to. We've been in the business for years and we still get it wrong
sometimes - not very often now, but a couple of times a year Now we'll be looking through work much more carefully before agreeing to do it. But no PowerPoint. It's only by making mistakes like this that you can learn things, but believe me, the more... So what I'm thinking now is that maybe it would be a good idea to sit down and formally write out a set of criteria for accepting a job. Run these through your head each time you get a new job. This kind of list can only be built by your own individual experience and circumstances. If you have a little list of questions to ask (which lives by the telephone) you will save yourself and the client a lot of time and hassle - protecting yourself from jobs that aren't suitable. Every time you have a negative experience like this, learn something from it and don't fall into the same trap again. To make a mistake is OK, but to make the same mistake more than once is plain silly. Experience comes from making mistakes, which means that someone who
hasn't made any mistakes is inexperienced. But fortunately you can learn
from the mistakes of others How experienced are you?
Alex Eames is the founder of translatortips.com,
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...painful the mistake the more easily remembered the lesson is for the next time!