Sunday, 18 February 2007

Annual report season

It's that time of the year again. When translators work silly hours in order to meet the demands of corporate clients who are publishing annual reports. And it's the same story every year. Firstly, we receive a detailed timetable from the client in early January as to when we can expect the first texts to arrive and when we're expected to deliver our translations. We then reserve work capacity accordingly. It then turns out that client is late in sending us the texts to translate, yet still expects us to meet their "non-negotiable" delivery deadline - which this year was 16 February. Over the last three weeks it was touch and go, but we managed it in the end. The worst aspect of this year's mad rush was having to correct the additions the CEO himself had made to translations that had already been delivered. I'm told the guy's Swedish and he may "speak better English than German", but it would have saved a lot of blood, sweat and tears had he got a native English speaker to do that job for him instead of leaving it to yours truly to decipher the results of his meddling.

Anyway, bar the final proofs - which will no doubt involve more ironing-out of the client's "corrections" - it looks like we're in the clear now, as far as this year is concerned, touch wood.

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