I’ve recently read an article about how stressed people are during vacation time. Apparently, lots of people have a hard time spending 24 hours a day with their relatives. They quite rarely have clear opinions about how they want to spend vacations, where to go and in what setting. Those who run their own business are afraid to leave it for a week or two for the fear that something will go wrong with it.
Bartosz Gumuła and Pascal Boivin invite you to join them on a webinar about basic functionalities of XTRF Translation Management System. Watch the webinar and see how simple to use is XTRF on daily work!
Sometimes we respond to less important e-mails immediately upon their receipt, while those that really demand our attention languish at the bottom of our in-box. We spend a quarter of an hour on an altogether meaningless call from the bank, and later we do not have sufficient time to call a loved one. We avail ourselves of promotional sales and buy things that later lie unused. Why is this so?
I often see how people start off their day at the office with a coffee, some gossip, and a look through the news on various portals, and afterwards reply to the various e-mails that they received since the evening before. But many of them are completely unaware of the fact that by doing so they have already used up one half of the best quality time available to them in the day.
Imagine you receive a new translation request, into your company’s local language. Who would you assign this project to? Write the name of the translator that you would contact first.
Quality in the localization industry is taken as a given. A client contacting a translation agency about a potential project is expecting a product that will meet tacitly-assumed quality standards so that it can be readily presented to end users. Any localization company that wants to stay in business must at some point introduce a quality management system. Of course, the client’s needs with respect to quality may differ depending on their priorities.
Having worked with a group of some 200 people who sent in more than 3,000 reports, I learned a great deal about what helps people increase their long-term productivity and level of calm, instead of simply becoming busier and busier. I do hope that these steps will prove useful to you, just as they were for the participants of the programme.
“Why do I have to report these particular metrics to my Director? I have no need for KPIs”. I’ve heard this so many times in all the companies where I’ve worked, and I continue to come across similar situations in numerous other businesses. People are often frustrated by the necessity of submitting reports to their superiors, and they feel that calculating KPIs is a loss of time. Their time.
We have more and more things to do, and each batch of new tasks has to be crammed into our calendars and worklists. In theory, the steadily increasing number of buzzing and flashing gadgets should help us better manage ourselves and our time, but in practice it turns out that these devices do not really allow us to achieve more, while along the way we lose our ability to focus long-term. The Pomodoro technique may well be the aid to regaining our concentration – read on to see what it consists in and how to apply it in practice.
The ISO 17100 standard is an international standard covering translation services. It constitutes the next step after the EN 15038 standard published in 2006 developing the rules and good practices of rendering linguistic services.
