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Should the translator be responsible for making changes as recommended by a reviewer?
Thread poster: Mark Sanderson
Kay Denney
Kay Denney  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 12:54
French to English
me too! Oct 13, 2015

Tom in London wrote:

Jenny Forbes wrote:

What to do?


Give them extremely long and detailed explanations of the process you followed before deciding on using the particular terms you adopted, including why you rejected other options and what they were.

I've found that if you do this a couple of times, punctiliously and at great length, they stop asking.




If a client comes back with "corrections" or feedback or whatever, I always take the time to reply, even if I'm on something urgent! I simply can't concentrate on anything else until my mind is at rest regarding the comments.

Last time I inundated a client with (slightly sarcastic) long-winded explanations, they came back with a "thank you so much, we'll only be using your services as from now"!

They did insist on keeping a certain term in despite my objections, but it's a small price to pay. They have a huge website and everything has to be bilingual since it's for tourists, so I'm going to be pretty busy. And it's for a lovely area of France, so it's almost like I'm on a working holiday.

I have another long-standing client who used to come back with loads of reviewer comments. After about a year, I suggested making a glossary because a lot of comments were about terms that had been translated more than one way (I was not the only translator working for them at the time). They paid me to do the glossary, sent it to all staff and all other translators, asking them to check the terms. The other free-lancers were to be paid for the time spent checking, and I think the client offered the lump sum I suggested based on the number of words. I got zero feedback and now any time there's a query I just say "I've used it before and nobody challenged it so now it's in the glossary". I do send them regular updates of the glossary any time they're willing to pay, but funnily enough, nobody ever seems able to locate a copy when they have a query. So basically I have the last word on everything written in English for that company. The time spent answering questions is a tiny trade-off for the huge volumes of work they send me.
 
Mark Sanderson
Mark Sanderson  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 11:54
Chinese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Accepting tracked changes Oct 14, 2015

Hello,

Thanks for all of the replies. I've finally come to a solution with the agency. Changes made by reviewers are to be made in a bilingual document with tracked changes so that I can accept or reject changes without an Excel spreadsheet anywhere in sight. Accepted changes can then be updated in the CAT tool using the 'update from an external review' function.

TBH it should have been done this way right from the very beginning.
 
Chris Says Bye
Chris Says Bye
No Oct 14, 2015

The checker should take responsibility for any changes and input them
 
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Should the translator be responsible for making changes as recommended by a reviewer?







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