Why your translator is asking you all those questions

The second item in the Reverso English-French dictionary entry for "outsider":

(without links to company) personne f recrutée à l'extérieur
Fiorina is the first true outsider to run the company.
Fiorina est la première PDG de la société recrutée à l'extérieur.

A literal translation of the French sentence is "Fiorina is the first CEO of the company recruited from outside." Not exactly the same as the English sentence, but a smooth, natural, and easily-understandable way to express the concept, which is what you're looking for when using that dictionary.

But you'll also notice that the translator who wrote the French sentence knows more information than is given in the English sentence. They know that Fiorina's title is CEO. They know that the reason she is considered an outsider is specifically that she was recruited from outside the company (as opposed to, say, not being a member of the Stonecutters). Oh, and they also know that she's a woman, as evidenced by "la première PDG" (if it were a man, it would say "le premier PDG").

As you can see by the Reverso entry, the English word outsider doesn't have one single equivalent concept in French. None of the other words given would communicate the right idea. (étrangère would imply that she's from another country; tiers implies third-party, which makes no sense because as CEO she's no longer a third party; and le outsider is specific to an athletic context, implying that she's a poor shot to win.) So to accurately communicate the message of the sentence, the translator needs information about the overall context.

So this is why your translator might call you up one day and ask about the genders of various people mentioned in the text, or how one thing mentioned relates to another, or a bit of background information on the situation. They want to be able to construct a text that will effortlessly tell the target-language audience exactly what the source text tells the source-language audience. If you don't answer their questions they'll have to guess, and the translation might not end up meaning what you want it to mean.