How to be efficient and never miss the deadlines

Managing deadlines

No matter how much of a genius a translator can be, if he or she fails to meet deadlines and doesn’t respond to messages for days on end, clients and agencies would rather work with an inexperienced translator who is always in touch and delivers on time. Breaking deadlines is unacceptable for a translator.

Tough deadlines to meet

Before you start working on a translation, discuss all the details with your client. Check all the folders and files of the project which the client or the translation company has sent you. More often than not, translators leave out the important added files, hidden texts, signatures for the pictures, etc. You can ask simple questions too since they can help you understand everything. What if the topic is not familiar to you? Wouldn’t it be difficult to translate? There is a caveat here – you can take on a new topic in translation if you have an experienced editor or expert, but even then, translating and proofreading the text can take two or three times longer than for a text of similar length on a familiar topic. Last but not least, check the level and subject of the texts that you will have to translate beforehand.

Leave all the other unnecessary stuff aside, just drop everything and sit on your computer. Tell other people, including your own family and friends, not to bother you for the next several hours. Also, tell people beforehand that you should not be disturbed for unimportant things, mute your phone and turn off the updates.

Why is it important for translators to meet deadlines?

Be efficient and punctual as a translator. Deadline delays can have negative consequences on the financial situation of the client and his reputation. As a result, you are likely to lose money by having to pay a fine for an overdue project and even lose your reputation as a reliable and experienced translator. Unfinished work can harm the client’s business. For example, a client ordered a full translation of several scientific papers for an oil and gas forum. He expects you to show results in a month. If you move the deadline, especially out of the blue, the client will not have time to prepare for the presentation. This creates an unpleasant chain of events: you miss the deadline, the client doesn’t have time to prepare, and in the end, you lost the client. Do you think this customer will ever come back to you for a translation?

How to turn in your work on time, a few tips

Start with the hard tasks. You will have all the energy necessary to do them. Leave the easy tasks for later. If you need to prepare 100 pages of texts in two or three weeks, you will have to evaluate the difficulty of such a task. Think about how many pages a day you will be able to translate. Set yourself a task that you will need to carry out every single day.

Do not take on new assignments if you don’t have time to complete the current one or are not confident in your abilities, particularly if this is not your work topic.

Set an additional deadline. Take more time for editing and proofreading. If you promised to deliver the translation on Thursday, schedule your own deadline for Wednesday. It is better to proofread the translation 100 times and correct the mistakes yourself than to receive comments from the client on the final translation, especially if there are penalties involved.

Relationship with the client

Clarify the deals and instructions in order to gain time

Be ready to negotiate the price per hour for your work and the volume of text that you will translate. Be firm and business-friendly. Be meticulous and rigorous with the problems that the clients send to you by e-mail. You should be willing to do the job well so that the client comes back to you next time. Read carefully the tasks at hand so that you’ll be better prepared to find solutions for the problems.

The importance of clear and effective communication between a translation agency and a freelance translator

Find the right way to deliver high-quality translations on time. When you work as a freelancer, there are some issues that you need to discuss with the translation agency in advance:

• Is timing more important than 100% linguistic perfection?
• What level of computer-assisted translation suits them?
• Is a generic translation acceptable or do they need a full localization?

Once you have all these questions figured out, you can start actively working on your translation.

Learn to say “no”

Sometimes the translation work that is offered to you is not worth it. Especially if you are not specialized in that specific domain at all. There are translations in economics and law, not to mention technical translations, translations of scientific articles or papers in physics, chemistry, etc. You need to preferably have some knowledge in a given field of expertise or have the linguistic capacity to do the job.

Be straightforward, inform the client about all the problems beforehand

Notify the customer in advance and discuss the possibility of moving the deadline. You may only be a couple of days or even a couple of hours away from completing the translation, but this time frame may suit the client. If you report a last-minute failure, the customer will have no choice and no time to deal with the situation. So, if this is an urgent order for a translation agency, the agency could end up giving part of the translation that you do not have time to complete to another translator. Such a decision will save the situation, and your reputation will suffer much less worse for wear.

Tigran Grigoryan