Key factors for better efficiency in linguistic project management
Linguistic Project Management is a complex matter and achieving efficiency can be a matter of months or years. A good project manager in an enterprise translation team or at a Language Service Provider truly is a jacks-of-all-trades. We’re making an attempt to list the most important ones below.
Most of the success factors for better efficiency in Linguistic Project Management can be classified in to one of the three areas:
- Competences and skills
- Industry knowledge and experience
- Tools and processes
Competences and skills
Effective communication is a skill that is fundamental when working with other people. Now imagine that these people are from different cultures and english is not their native language. Some will be very technical, some will still be using a fax machine. Some will be your clients and others will be your providers (don’t be fooled – both are equally important and your success depends on both).
If effective communication is not your forte, chances are you would not be hired as as a Linguistic Project Manager, nonetheless it’s a skill that can and should continuously be improved as the language industry evolves.
Cultural sensitivity and awareness can to some extent be taught and in a multilingual environment it mostly is ‘learning by doing’. Linguistic Project Managers work with linguists whose localization expertise is critical to ensure that content resonates with the target audience. At the same time, these linguists will need to be given feedback which is oftentimes differently responded to depending on a given culture. Preferential changes to a translation can sometimes be seen as an offense to the translation craft, so it’s a delicate role to pass such comments on.
Moving slightly away from the innate towards what can and should be taught, the localization industry fosters a truly client-centric approach. It seems easy to just focus on the content and make sure that everything you do is done for the best interest of a high quality translation that corresponds with the purpose of the text. Unfortunately, you also need to balance the cost and time of delivery, both of which are precisely measurable (unlike quality).
As you progress in your career as a Linguistic Project Manager, you will come across clients who are industry veterans as well as these sending their first translation out. You need to act as their advisor to balance the budget and turnaround time while achieving a fit-for-purpose quality translation.
Industry knowledge and experience
While we’re at deadlines, projects that run for months or literally never stop will have mid-job milestones, that are non-negotiable. Neither to the client, nor your team of linguists, and it’s your job to have both of these perspectives match. Setting realistic deadlines and milestones is essential for keeping the project on schedule and ensuring timely delivery. Proactive project tracking, milestone monitoring, and risk management strategies will help mitigate delays and minimize project disruptions, but that takes time to learn. Ideally, not from your mistakes but from more experienced peers.
That’s why, if you want to achieve efficiency in Linguistic Project Management, it’s critical to build a culture of continuous improvement and learning in your team and organization. It does not require an ISO certificate (but it does make it easier) to regularly evaluate project performance, identify areas for enhancement, and implement lessons learned to refine processes and optimize efficiency over time.
Tools and process
Typically, continuous learning goes hand in hand with a clearly described and easily understood quality assurance system. There are many industry specific quality norms, and you don’t need to know them all by hard, but being able to correctly tell the difference between linguistic validation and proofreading, or style guides and terminology glossaries will eventually be critical if you will want to take your Linguistic Project Management to a professional level.
With time, you will realize that a quality management system is much more than a certificate hanging on a wall, it actually does help with maintaining accuracy, consistency, and overall quality of the work you and your organization delivers.
Regardless of how experienced of a professional you are, you cannot do it all by yourself. Quite contrary, with experience – the value of your time grows and the last thing you would want is to spend it on tedious repetitive manual tasks. After all, there are tools for that! Being able to navigate in the myriad of language industry tools is partially a matter of your experience and of the organization’s culture and way of working.
There are different levels of automation and different tiers Translation Business Management Systems (TBMS), but it’s impossible to work without one and deliver good results to your clients while having you as a Linguistic Project Manager perform only meaningful tasks.
If you would like to learn more about what it takes to be efficient in the Language Industry today, we would be more than happy to schedule an online meeting and help you up your game as a Linguistic Project Manager.