In translation and localization industry, PMs are usually a group of people who do scheduling and rescheduling often, detail carefully, communicate skillfully and respond quickly.

Under help of computer technologies, project management becomes more efficient and smarter, thus PMs are also becoming experts in operating many kinds of software and systems, in tackling technical obstacles to manage projects smoothly and maintain an accurate data at the same time.

To manage well various kinds of projects, PMs need to have a general knowledge on translation process (how translators work), DTP process (how DTPers operate), and even IT process (how engineers require in related localization).

I am a PM myself, and above is my own understanding on PMs and our work. And then comes how we can do our job well? To narrow down the topic a bit, this time I would like to talk about how PMs could do a successful job when serving as bridge between linguists and clients. The key is simple, just to think of how we could help them in every possible manner.

Helping clients:

  1. Targeting their needs exactly and completely in advance, and when not certain about anything, having all questions clarified through active and timely communication with clients;
  2. Providing solutions or alternative questions when making queries;
  3. Choosing the most appropriate resources to take corresponding projects and monitoring every steps of the whole process;
  4. Always deliver a high quality work with details perfected;
  5. Advising to make cooperation more efficient and fruitful on clients` side;
  6. Providing extra service to bring them unexpected satisfaction.

Helping translators:

  1. Thinking of the difficulties linguists may face, then finding solutions and providing them in advance when necessary;
  2. Notifying them about new projects with all essential information included in one email, because it causes time consumption to check more emails when one could do;
  3. Always being ready to help when they need assist during their translating;
  4. Providing feedback for their self-improvement from other linguists who review or QA their work or clients who give comments about their performance;
  5. Supporting them technically by creating glossary, maintaining TM and sometimes teaching the use of translation and localization tools;
  6. Always bearing in mind that it is our linguists who are the core to high quality translation.

By helping others, we are helping ourselves in the meantime. When both linguists and clients start to benefit by working with us, they would want more cooperation, and that is when we could always lead to a well-done job easily and also PMs are supposed to be greatly valued.