It is never easy to ask questions. As professionals, we might fear that people reading our questions think we should have known, or found, the answer ourselves. Many of us have also experienced translation project managers (TPMs) or clients ignoring the questions we asked, or at least not paying attention to all of them. It also takes time to write questions, check the answers, discuss some of the options and/or implement any subsequent changes.
Clients are sometimes swamped with work, do not have time to reply to questions, are not able to provide answers themselves or simply underestimate the value of this exchange process.
When translation projects go through translation agencies, project managers are sometimes completely inundated by the mountain of jobs they have to oversee simultaneously and could get annoyed by a high number of questions to sort out. They might overlook some or simply not invest enough time in dealing with them or even not relay them to the various project stakeholders. More.
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Local time: 17:31
French to English
If the client cannot deal with the matter, I will simply do he b... See more
If the client cannot deal with the matter, I will simply do he best I can and explain doubts in a covering mail when I send the work through. ▲ Collapse
Local time: 10:31
German to English
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I cannot imagine a professional "fearing" what the writer says, unless perhaps she is talking about novices in the field. Asking questions is the professional thing to do, and that's pretty standard. Maybe it's just me, but I find this kind of introduction quite off-puttin... See more
I cannot imagine a professional "fearing" what the writer says, unless perhaps she is talking about novices in the field. Asking questions is the professional thing to do, and that's pretty standard. Maybe it's just me, but I find this kind of introduction quite off-putting.
Atm I can't remember this happening, and it sounds both unprofessional and inefficient. If this happens, then the company should have a hard look at their practices, workload etc. and this goes outside the issue of asking questions.
Much of the rest of the article talks about a formatting of questions within some kind of form which must be what that particular company uses in-house. I'm glad never to have encountered such a form, and I would not impose such a thing on my customers. It seems to make a simple thing needlessly complicated. When you have a question, you formulate it in such a way as to make sense to the person being asked, at a level that person will understand, and containing whatever is necessary and pertinent.
One thing the article does not go into is timing and process. Questions should be asked above all before beginning a project, and even before deciding to take on a project. A few questions might arise during the process, but most of them would have been gotten out of the way before even starting. And both parties definitely have to make time for them (still thinking about these unresponsive overworked PMs in the article). ▲ Collapse
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