Whatever the industry, a project manager’s job will always cover a few general areas. They act as a bridge between the project team and the outside world, prioritise tasks, allocate resources, manage scheduling and take care of other administrative and organisational issues. If we’re talking more specifically about the translation industry, yes, a project manager’s job does meet all of these criteria – in the abstract. But in practice there’s a little more to it than that, because the specifics of translation work mean that certain specialist skills are required. Without them – without a good project manager, in other words – a translation project could falter or even fail entirely.

So what does a translation project manager do? We can answer this question by working through a hypothetical example project. First, the PM receives an enquiry from a client in the engineering sector. There’s a training manual that needs to be translated from Polish to Ukrainian: can it be done? The PM discusses the situation with the client, identifying things like the client’s budget, the source and target language, and the expected deadline. If the agency offers any additional services, such as layout and desktop publishing or extra QA steps, the PM may also offer these to the client. For this step, then, the PM needs a good mixture of soft skills such as sales and customer relations expertise, coupled with a deep understanding of the translation process that allows them to determine whether or not the client’s expectations are realistic – and, if necessary, to work productively with the client to adjust those expectations as required. More.

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