Necessary Resources

A. Human Resources

Sometimes, all steps within a project may be performed by a single person. In other cases, projects require the help of dozens of people. It is the responsibility of the project manager to assemble the project team.

The translation will be handled by one or more translators. Those translators may also be used for reviewing translations. It may even be necessary to call upon "specialised" reviewers, as described above.

It is uncommon for translators to be responsible for "technical" steps. As such, specialists in page setting will be assigned to the documentation, computer specialists will be assigned to the technical tasks within the software and websites, etc. Translators occasionally may be called upon during technical steps, for example during software testing in order to verify the relevance of some translations in context.

Organising these teams is generally up to the project manager. For large-scale projects, some may be deemed responsible for a particular team (for example, a person in charge of the translators), and even other project managers.

Indeed, in "multilingual" projects, involving several linguistic teams, it is not uncommon for the project as a whole to be managed by an "International Project Manager" (IPM) under which the "Local Project Managers" (LPM) are responsible for one or several languages. The potential structurings for such projects are numerous. Thus, the international project manager might be in contact only with the LPMs managing the technical or linguistic aspects of the project. The IPM may also lead the LPMs involved only in the linguistic portion and then direct one or more technical teams, centralising the tasks for the various languages.

B. Material Resources

In some particular circumstances or due to the nature of a project itself, it may sometimes be necessary to plan for specific material resources.

Some projects require the rental or purchase of additional computers (for example, projects involving additional people), new software licences (for example, projects requiring particular software), etc. This includes multimedia projects that require a recording or editing studio to possibly be rented. Or even projects containing brand new content and requiring specific training material to be purchased.

The project manager's role will consequently be not only to determine the necessary steps and elements involved in a project, but also to analyse the project's feasability with respect to the allotted time, the allocated budget, and the available qualified human resources.


Publication: Matis, Nancy. 2005. La gestion de projets de traduction et sa place dans la formation de traducteurs, Équivalences, number 32/1 2005 - "La traduction à l'heure de la localisation" HEB, Haute École de Bruxelles, 47-62.