As shown in the article on numbers included in this newsletter, the volume of words requested by our humanitarian clients and delivered by our amazing volunteer keeps growing and the Translators without Borders (TwB) Workspace powered by ProZ.com has proved very scalable, with almost 900K words handled last February with a minimum of project management.
But then you realize that the help we have delivered is small when compared to the translation needs that block the access of so many fellow human beings to health and food, education and hope, and it becomes clear that we need to be working hard to keep improving.
And since the humanitarian organizations that require the translations, the volunteers who deliver them, and Translators without Borders in the coordination role are all part of the same humanitarian process, we would like to discuss with all of you the path ahead and ask for your comments, feedback and help.
The following areas have been identified for improvement:
- The clients’ experience when they
- access the platform to post a translation need, to communicate with the translators and to retrieve the translation.
- access Translators without Borders to ask for admission into the system, creation of new profiles and any other administrative request.
- The volunteer translators’ experience regarding
- their access to the TWB Workspace for evaluating and accepting translation requests, communicating with the client, other translators and the project manager, and delivering the translations.
- the satisfaction, recognition, promotion and other benefits associated with their participation in TWB.
- The quality of the translations produced in the workspace, including
- the use and sharing at a client level of translation memories and glossaries.
- the activity of editors within the TWB Workspace including, among others, the problems of selecting the editors, modifying the workflow to include their work, deciding in what jobs they will be involved and providing recognition to the editors.
- The scalability of the operation, including
- recruiting good translators, especially in language pairs with strong demand and in those where knowledge is needed and our capacity small or nonexistent, such as many languages of Africa and India. Recruiting involves the promotion needed to get volunteers and screening the volunteers to identify the good translators among them.
- the promotion of our services among humanitarian organizations to be able to provide more help in language pairs where we have strong capacity, such as English to Spanish.
- the ability of engaging volunteer project managers for the management of certain projects.
The following steps have been adopted for allowing clients and volunteers to provide feedback and involvement:
- A survey was made available for our translators, where the questions were translated into Spanish, French and Arabic. This survey received the feedback from 441 volunteers. Results will be made public in our next newsletter.
- A similar survey for humanitarian clients will be made available shortly.
- A set of private forums have been created for the discussion of some of these issues. If you are interested in participating please contact us at [email protected]