Sunday, May 02, 2010

Wherein I finally figure out how to use my Signature Strength

Translation most often falls close to the end of the project cycle. After all, there's no point in paying a translator to translate the first draft if it's all just going to get rewritten again later. However, this often ends up putting the crunch on us. I've been in a number of situations recently where someone before me in the project cycle gave an over-optimistic estimate of how long their part would take them, so I got the text later than I should have. Because printers' deadlines and pre-announced released dates are immovable, that means I have to absorb the lost time and I often end up turning out work that I'm not exactly proud of, because there simply isn't time to do work I am proud of and the client would rather have suboptimal English than delay the release date. However, this makes me very frustrated with the person whose overestimation of their own abilities shortened my translation time, and if I had a say in the matter it would be enough to make me not want to work with them again.

I thought of this when I read Clay Shirky's Rant About Women:

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.


One thing I've been doing in my own life, primarily out of distaste for the self-aggrandizing jerks and pompous blowhards I've encountered, is I always try to represent my level of confidence and certainty accurately. I try to give safe deadline estimates, not optimistic ones. When I know I can do the thousand words in an hour I say so, but if I'm not sure if I can I say it will take three hours. (Q: WTF's with the wide range? A: I can work much faster when I'm already familiar with the text type and the subject matter.) If you've been reading my blog for a while, you might have noticed that I try very hard not to make declarative statements unless I'm actually certain. I do that in real life too, and I've found that it's given me credibility over time. When I do make a declarative statement, people tend to listen.

Recently we had a client request a very large, important text for an impossibly tight deadline. After some discussion and negotiation, we came to the conclusion that we could deliver it on time by dividing it up among the entire team, but we couldn't guarantee our normal quality level. Normally, if a text is divided up among several translators, another translator who didn't work on it rereads the whole thing and makes sure it's internally consistent. There simply wasn't time for that to happen. But it was so important and the deadline was so imperative that the client agreed to this, and made time in their own schedule to come into work early to reread it and do quality control themselves. Once it was all done, we ended up getting a very happy email from the client, because the text we delivered was of high quality and needed very little revision at all. Which wasn't completely surprising - we do do high quality work - but we couldn't realistically guarantee the quality if no one does a reread. So we give a realistic estimate, exceed it somewhat, and the client is happy. On the other hand, the people before me in the project cycles overestimate their abilities, and it annoys people downstream and is detrimental to the quality of the entire project.

A long time ago, I took the VIA Signature Strengths quiz and found that my top signature strength is modesty and humility. But you're supposed to use your signature strengths, and I couldn't tell how you actually use modesty and humility.

Turns out this is how. And it only took me five years to figure it out.

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