Oh no! how do I get this huge project translated into French in a week?!

A service we have offered to agencies several times is to lead the translation of very large projects which are urgent. End clients don't always realise that if they have needed a year to write a technical proposal, no French translator, no matter how brilliant, can translate it in a couple of days!

So what you need is someone very experienced like our Philippe Salmon, who can ensure that there is an agreed glossary and style guide for a group of translators working on different parts of a large project. This is important because technical terminology can vary between companies, using different terms for the same component. Also, there are different styles which need to be consistent across the whole document so that it reads well.

Too many cooks?

We once worked on a very important environmental project in Algeria which had been put together by a number of expert engineers and consultants. The problem was that none of them had read the other sections! So when we received it for translation into French, it was littered with inconsistencies throughout which gave a damaging impression of the quality of the proposal. We pointed this out and offered to amend the source English as we went through. We also worked with other four other French translators of varying experience to ensure the French document was consistent in terminology and style. We edited the final version, too.

This very "meaty" project went very well and the agency and end client were both very pleased by the end result which was completed on time.