The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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TEAM WORK Adam Dewhirst and the other project managers on his MA course at the University of Leeds (below); the redbrick Great Hall on the main campus (above); and the university's Parkinson building (above right) 14 The Linguist Vol/56 No/3 2017 www.ciol.org.uk FEATURES The role of the clients was taken by our excellent tutors, who dedicate lots of their time to make these projects possible. I think they also enjoy ensuring that we encounter additional challenges along the way, as we are likely to in our professional work in the future. For example, they sent extra files after we had already prepared the project and allocated work to each of the translators, meaning that we had to rethink and incorporate these new files into the workflow. Thanks to our tutors' links with local and international NGOs (non- governmental organisations), the translations produced in these projects often go on to be used online. ESTABLISHING A TIMELINE While we were recruiting translators, we were also planning the project timeline and preparing the files. Each project manager was responsible for a team of eight translators in addition to all of the files for one or two language pairs. With the project taking place in two countries, we had to consider the slight time difference and the fact that we could only communicate with the translators in France by email. As we had to allow time for revision, as well as translation, we had initially intended to use a waterfall workflow, in which one stage is completed before another one begins. However, when many of our translators returned their work early, we decided to start the revision stage ahead of schedule. This worked in our favour because we had given ourselves a very short turnaround time between the revisers' deadline and our own deadline for delivery to the clients. By working together to process the revised translations and generate target files, we managed to complete our project on time. As this project took place in the context of our module on CAT tools, technology played a central role, and also presented a number of challenges. At Leeds, we were using Déjà Vu X3 as our main tool, but in Metz they were using SDL Trados Studio 2015. As we had already learnt to use Studio at Leeds, this was a great opportunity to work with more than one CAT tool at the same time. Instead of just preparing the files for these translators in Studio, we chose to base the project in Déjà Vu X3. One of the reasons for this was its 'Divide & Dispatch' function, which allowed us to quickly split files between a chosen number of translators, or into packages containing a specific number of words. The divided files could then be exported as XLIFFs, with which we could create new projects in Studio and send project packages to the translators in France. However, we encountered difficulties importing the translated XLIFFs back into Déjà Vu X3 in order to generate target files. Fortunately, having already learnt that CAT tools do not always provide the level of interoperability we might hope for, I tested the process at the start of the project with the help of my colleagues. This enabled us to identify this issue in the first few days, instead of near the end of the project. In case it happened again and we were unable to find a solution, we devised a workaround: we asked the translators also to provide a translation memory containing their revised work, with which we could pre-translate the original project in Déjà Vu X3. After speaking to a number of representatives from translation companies, I have learnt that problems arising from transferring files between CAT tools are fairly common. Finding solutions to this kind of technological challenge was particularly rewarding and the experience will hopefully be useful for our work in the future. Managing the projects for the translators in Leeds was less complicated thanks to Déjà Vu X3's Team Server. Although we initially encountered some problems with language resources not remaining attached to packages, the server environment made it easier to share files and for translators to collaborate during the project. Our