I hate it when this happens...

After translating a few hundred words of the project due soon after noon today, it became apparent that I had run my eyeballs over identical text, and recently. As it turned out, the end client had submitted a document for translation to my client that I had translated almost three weeks ago for said client.

Now, there are translators of my past acquaintance who would yawn, calmly pour and drink a cup or two of coffee, maybe run their eyeballs over the previously translated text, stretch languorously, and then send off the document and invoice another payday, but the way I see it, taking advantage of an oversight like that—and it's an oversight even if it was made deliberately—is poor business.

I'll leave the preachy reasons for why this is so as an exercise for the reader, except for one that I call "the human element."

The client, you see, is not just some vague corporate entity at the other end of the cloud. In practical terms, there is a human at the other end of the connection who goes by a title such as "Translation Coordinator" or "Project Manager" and who is typically under more pressure to Get Stuff Done™ than a mongoose at a cobra convention.

If it turns out the end client goofed, you've given your client an opportunity to shine. If it turns out that the person who sent you the assignment made a mistake, then you've just saved them from getting chewed out by their boss. In either case, I've found that making the person at the other end of the connection look good translates (pardon the pun) into more assignments, made more frequently.

And what's really mind-blowing is this: In more cases than I care to count, after I've made clients aware of the situation, they've instructed me to continue with the assignment and to invoice it.

So now that half of today's to-do list is punched. I think I'll go for a walk.

Cheers...

Invoicing gremlins...

The invoicing process turned and snapped at me again today, or at least it seemed that way. One of my clients has fundamentally changed the way work is invoiced, transitioning from a fairly traditional "per word" model to an hourly model, where the allowable number of hours that can be charged times the hourly rate just happen to be equal to the per-word rate.

Translators welcome changes like this about as much as retirees like inflation, and probably not as much, because often, there's some kind of catch. Even without any catch, it's extra work on the invoicing end, and extra steps always introduce the potential for error.

In any event, the invoicing for the month is over, and what started as a "mediocre" month a couple of days ago dropped to being "borderline" yesterday (when I found out about the invoicing snafu) before jumping up to become an "fair" month today.

In any event, the hardcopy record I've been keeping of various jobs just wasn't working out (mostly because the notebook kept wandering), and so a little while ago, I consolidated my checklist from over a decade ago (when it mattered whether delivery was to be made by fax, email, or courier) with some of the notice-to-proceed documents that some clients send me.

I took the result and arranged it on a OneNote page and made the thing a template. Then I've logged the two jobs that came in today into a separate OneNote notebook using that template. The proof of the pudding will come when the time comes to invoice the work.

Cheers...