Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2022

Discussion: Managing Stakeholders

A point of view of a freelance localizer and translator Who was the stakeholder and what was their role? For this discussion, I am going to use my freelancing experiences and use my clients as stakeholders. These clients are mainly LSPs and within that, primarily need to deal with translation project managers or project coordinators. In some cases they are more on the junior side, meaning they are not involved that much in the entire project but only in the coordination between linguists, and in some cases, they are senior project managers who have more interests in the project outcome because they need to manage them from beginning to end and they also need to deal with their clients. In some cases, depending also on the client and the size of the company, the project manager can be the owner or the president of the organization at the same time. As I mainly had pleasant experiences with these stakeholders, I am going to explain how I learned to deal with them in general going into de

Confessions About a Real Case: Dysfunctional Teams

While preserving the necessary anonymity, please share the dysfunction you encountered. What were the difficulties and how did they impact the team? This situation happened a few years ago. I was part of a team working on some high-profile projects for a Fortune 100 company through an LSP. The LSP's leadership - somewhat inexperienced and young - wanted to create high-functioning teams based on languages where team members help each other. The projects were assessed individually but the team’s collective quality score decided how well the LSP performed.  How did you or your team leader (or anyone else in the team, for that matter) try to address the problem? What strategy(ies) did you or they use? The problem is that while they had a theoretical idea about creating a positive team, they did not have any strategy in hand. Naturally, the team started out positively but after a while because of miscommunication, misunderstandings, lack of instructions, and training fear started to cre