One afternoon last week, on the way to picking my son up from preschool, my cell phone rang. It was a client offering me an important rush job - more than 7,000 words due in 56 hours.
After taking a deep breath and clarifying that they would pay me a rush-job surcharge, I accepted the assignment.
I took my kids home and played with them for an hour or so, before someone came to look after them. Then I sat down to begin work...
I received an email with detailed instructions from the client, including the following:
It is important to us (in this case and always) that you not only translate but also edit the translation. In other words, after translating a sentence, we would like you to review the translated text, independent of the Hebrew original, and turn it into an articulate sentence in English. The goal is that it does not appear to be translated but rather is a fluent and well-written sentence in English. That will often require changing the sentence structure (or even turning it into 2 sentences if necessary), as Hebrew and English sentence structure differ. Where necessary, I encourage you to change sentence structure or the way something is expressed, in order to obtain fluency and good English writing. Our hope is that the report will read like a good report in English, as though it had been written in English.
Either this client has been reading my monologues about translation quality on this blog or they have been burned in the past. (I suspect the latter.)
It's nice to have a discerning client who really appreciates quality. Heck, most my clients hardly speak a word of English and are in no position to appreciate a handsome turn of phrase that I came to me in the middle of the night. But it also adds pressure...
Two and a half days later I submitted the translation.
The next day, I received a nice thank you from the client, plus a short list of points where my grammar was imprecise.
Today they booked me for another large job. I guess that means they're satisfied!
