tranfree issue 41 - 18 October 2001

Nobody's Perfect

By Alex Eames

Just before we went on holiday we did a small job for a client and basically rushed it because we shouldn't have taken it on when we were already busy.

You know the situation...

• you're busy
• good client phones and you don't want to let them down
• they persuade you to take a job
• so you take it when you're either too busy or too tired
• you end up making careless mistake(s)

It was only a little job. A couple of hundred words. But this client has a rigid Quality Assurance procedure. They get every job checked. So a couple of rather messy sentences got totally...

...trashed by the checker. ---OUCH!

HAHAHAHA - I hear you all think. You should practice what you preach! Quite right. Indisputable. Undeniable. Guilty as charged!

But you show me a translator who has never fallen into this kind of self-inflicted trap. Sometimes it just happens that you get busy and before you know it you're overloaded. Something has to give. But it is very important to try to maintain a high level of quality because that is what brings the clients back to you again and again.

If you want to charge top-dollar, you have to deliver quality and speed these days.

Even More Interesting

But the second half of the story is even more interesting...

This week, the same client sent us the same file again under a different job number, with some other little bits and pieces we hadn't done before.

We told them that we'd done this file before and they said...

"No problem it must be from a different
department of our client"

So basically we're going to get paid for the same text again. Happy Days

But here's the funny part. This same file, which we sent in before, got through their quality check before. But it was not until this time - the second time - that the quality check proved to be negative.

So either...

• it wasn't all that bad after all, or
• the checker they used this time was a bit harsh, or
• the checker they used the first time was too soft, or
• their quality procedure failed them last time

...which goes to show that even if, as we admit, a couple of sentences were a little shoddy, nobody's perfect!

So How Did We Resolve It?

I phoned the project manager and acknowledged that the work could have been better and apologised. She asked us to be more careful in future and said that it would not affect their allocation of work to us. After all it was not a deadly serious quality issue, but just something to keep an eye on.

So, it all worked out OK in the end. But it's a good wake-up call to keep an eye on the quality of our output.

Idiots make the same mistakes over and over again.

Bright people learn the first time.

Really bright people (that's YOU) learn from the mistakes of others.

Alex Eames is the founder of translatortips.com,
editor of tranfree and author of the eBook...

How to Earn $80,000+ Per Year as a Freelance Translator
http://www.translatortips.net/ht50.html

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