EMT Competences: Service provision

Here are two experiences that improved my skills as a service provider:

Review of common industry practices relating to ethics

As part of my postgraduate programme, I reviewed many translator’s associations’ ethical guidelines and terms of service with the help of my classmates to find out common patterns of requirements. This experience gave me a better understanding on the ethical guard-rails the industry has set in place to make sure translators and authors are treated appropriately.

Of this review, here are common ethical requirements I noted as important:

• Privacy: Do not share or otherwise reveal personal information to third parties.
• Impartiality: Do not pick a side. This is especially important in interpreting.
• Accuracy: Make sure you are producing a fair representation of the original text.
• Honesty
• Collegiality: Work with and support your peers.
• Conflict resolution: Avoid litigeous situations.
• Training: Follow training in areas you want to specialise in, and to keep up with new knowledge.
• Recognition of work done: Pay translators fairly, and give them credit when appropriate.
• Professionalism: Interract using an appropriate tone with clients.

On top of those, I have also my own ethical guidelines and personnal philosphy, which I try my best to follow, and which generally aligns with the requirements I listed above. Each translators’ association also has their own principle that one, of course, has to follow as a member, on top of specific requirements a client or agency may have.

Budget tracking

During the STB I did as part of my Master’s degree, one of my (many) roles was to keep track of the budget for the group. I took on this role, as I already had experience with such tasks (my mother has worked most of her life as an accountant, and I learned to use Excel at age 10!). I started by writing down my rates for a variety of translation and translation-related tasks, and encouraging other team members to do the same. By being quite extensive in the categories of work we planned, we had rates for all types of work coming our way, allowing any team member to answer any client request without asking anyone else– everything was thoroughly documented internally.

I then made a simple spreadsheet using standard Excel functions to make accounting easier. This gave us early on visibility on the type of work we needed to carry out, and confirmed that our rates were well set. I quickly extended my spreadsheet to also break down costs and revenue per-project, which also helped us understand where our money came from.

Overall, I believe my work on budget tracking helped us give precise answers to customer requests quickly, and ensured that we were not paying more money than we could afford. Though we only used simple spreadsheets (mostly because we did not have many projects to track), a similar system could be scaled using more appropriate cost management systems (though here, the overhead of creating client profiles and projects would have likely taken more time than making simple spreadsheets).