Translation Project Management

okay, updated the accounting to include this item. Have you filled in the Payment Form yet? Because if you want a wire transfer I find my bank usually requires more information than you put on your invoice. Concerning the payment, I think I have been quite clear from the beginning concerning my present situation, asking you for your interest charges, and now you seem rather demanding that you want payment for certain by your invoice date. This is contrary to what I wrote to you in the beginning and what we have been discussing all this time. I'd like to point out that these large final samples, and testing everyone in all these languages, with multiple assessors and several proofreaders, can get pretty pricey, and I have not had  translation project management work for a long time. In any case, you are the only one who has been demanding payment so far, and I do have some funds in my bank, so I will make every endevour to pay you on time, so as to maintain a healthy relationship. But I would appreciate it if you appreciated my present predicament, and what we had agreed on from the beginning. Or at least I felt I was making myself quite clear, and I can dig up those original emails if you want. Nevertheless, that should not be necessary as I think I can find the funds to pay you on time. So your invoice says "inside of 6 weeks from January 19". So would that be like March 7 or something? I'll put it in my calendar and try to pay sooner.

it occrred to me that I'd eventually want to forward you emails like this as well. But ones like this should be signed from me, not you. I have copied my response below, so we can start to think about responding to these emails as well. I'll eventually send you the appropriate ctrl+m responses, or we'll get into a groove somehow. First we must sort out your smtp and other matters. So how are you sending now? From Pegasus through gmail or something? That seemed to work fine. Don't respond to this letter to this translation project management customer, as I already have. But looks like I've got some potential bites, yesterday sending emails to the whole list you prepared so far. Once you send me a list, perhaps start a fresh new Excel file so that I do not have to search for starting points and not accidentally approach people I have already approached. If I find a customer who wants to buy these email addresses, I'll compile them myself. I've approached my Chinese translators so that we can approach the Chinese in their own translation language combination, translate parts of my website, and maybe have someone stand by to answer Chinese emails. Maybe I should set up [email protected], heh heh. So just keep collecting more Chinese addresses until I get all this translated, or until some number is reached, and then we can dabble in other directions, until we find some pot of gold.

obviously don't respond to again, but if you press Reply, you will see the return email address. Maybe you could go to their website based on that and try to find a more updated email. I'll approach them again and update their records. Receiving failure messages for a lot of the emails, so will try to filter them out so that I can sell a clean list.

> (54*0.02*90)

okay, getting better, but I still would like to point out that the first 31 of these 54 were either "wrong language pair" or "no language pair", so you would not have even read those cases, but just put a score. Do you want to charge a full 0.02 for those cases as well? Just so there is no misunderstanding, please do not do any more assessments as I have enough Arabians tested for now, and will resume testing at a later date. I think there were so many wrong samples because Arab is the first language in the list and a lot of people were not selecting their language first but just submitting to the default language.

I looked and it seems you evaluated 63 samples, of which the first 13 were "wrong or no sample". Italian and Spanish had an above average number of samples, and most translators so far have been charging between 3 and 29 dollars for their assessments. Does this help?

okay, think we have struck a good system regarding this. I'm sure we'll be perpetually improving our system. Responding to your last email on my mobile, I understand a bit of hardware. What fried on your computer? Was it your earphone and microphone jacks or internal sound card? Or I guess something on your motherboard which would prevent you from hooking up a new internal sound card? Possible, but sometimes finding a better technician can do wonders. In any case, this sound thing is not so burning at the moment. But I could also suggest as a future possibility an external sound card plugged into your USB, which I think would have to be 2.0 to transfer the large amount of data. I got that because I like music, and I can use this for recording, or for hooking up 7.1 surround sound. It cost around a hundred bucks and is near top of the line, so I am sure there are cheaper alternatives. Only a suggestion if the need arose. When I have the system fully set up, it is quite amazing. I actually have a good stereo in the truck, with a big LCD panel, and can probably produce 5.1 surround sound, but need some juice/electricity for that. Would be fun to entertain a village one day. All I need is a mixer and I practically have a recording studio. But haven't had much opportunity to get into music with others while traveling.

I believe I wrote the procedures in detail in the RW instructions and it is not that complicated. There are two approaches. One is when there is time, and the vettor and proofreader do not work at the same time. That is more simple. When they work at the same time, then it does not make sense for you to do any formatting changes, but rather put comments in <> brackets indicating where changes will be necessary later, which you would apply to the proofread files once they are completed. The vetting then becomes preparatory work. You are researching what changes will be necessary, or what you found missing, and then apply it to the proofread file at the end (or inform the proofreader if something is found missing).

I still have to approach the proofreaders, based on who has responded and their comments concerning the translation project. So this process will take several days to complete. So you have some time for this vetting process. But once the proofread is actually complete, I do not want to delay delivery to the customer much longer, which is why I am working on the vetting part now. Also, try to develop some strategy so that the files look kind of similar when delivering them to the customer, although I know it will not be possible. But the customer is more interested in the actual text and my price at the moment.

I've checked a lot of them out, because they sent them to me by email first and I uploaded them later. When we actually get the work we will have to think up an entirely different system, hopefully through Transit, but these technical details will have to be sorted out later. For Transit it would require a 3,000$ investment. Perhaps Trados. This part is complicated, but for now, I have agreed with the customer to focus only on the text. Any graphics provided by the translator is bonus, but when we actually translate, we would not be providing the files in this Word format.

Some translators combined the files. Perhaps we could break them up again. I will let you ponder on this and I'll take a second look at it at the very end. Presentation is also important for this tender, but we will be limited. I'll see how it looks later, but please think about it, look for anything missing, and make any comments regarding any formatting suggestions.

okay, I have updated your accounting, but your hourly charge seems pretty high compared to your charge per word. The other translators have charged me between 3 and 25$ total for the assessments. If you can charge something more similar it would be better for me, considering I am stretching myself rather thin in my endeavour to win this tender. I noticed you have at least two records in my database, and I have chosen code 6598 for the final one with the accounting, because it is more complete and you put more information there. So please make sure to use that account when updating your payment information.

concerning the Panasonic project and other possible work, Panasonic said they’d like to start end of January with some of the languages. They are basically trying to find another vendor for their translations, because their present one is too expensive. The first year or two they could give us work mostly from their Malaysian plant (about 300,000 words a year, all languages combined), with 10 times that volume from their Japanese plants after that. But they are negotiating with a lot of translating agencies and no agreement has yet been reached. Otherwise, right now I am entering a major marketing campaign. My last marketing push was about 7 years ago, but since then I was too busy dealing with large projects to have time to do anything else. When I did find some time I would focus on improving things to increase my capacity. The last two years I have focused heavily in this area, and now I am ready for a major expansion, so hopefully it will not be too long until I will be able to start to send you some work. I will use the Panasonic tender to test translators in general.

okay, nice big and fat letters. Easy to read. So which smtp did you use? Was it runbox? Why do you not want to use gmail? I am sure you can put the proper RW1 email address into your Pegasus identity. I would like something stable. I've asked my programmers if they could suggest some smtp server and will let you know when I get something.