Last week a batch of work arrived at the office: a set of shipping documents for a South American market, several product manuals and the accompanying declarations of conformity, some twenty or thirty thousand characters in all, into Spanish. The client was a local company working in exports; there is no need to name them. The material was not especially tidy. Some of it came as editable files and some as photographs of stamped originals, with seals pressed over the corners of the page and one sheet cut off halfway down a table. In a message the client asked whether we could send a draft "just to look at" first, so that everything could be ready before the holiday.
We hear that request often. Taken literally, the fastest response would be to divide the files and start translating the same day; with this kind of work, that is exactly what one must not do. At the scheduling meeting Mr Tang settled it before anyone opened a document: no glossary, no drafting. So that morning produced not a single line of translation, only a table.
Lock the product names before writing a word
The left column held the Chinese source wording, the right column the agreed Spanish, and the middle column recorded where each item appeared: certificate, invoice, packing list, manual, outer carton. Reading down the list, the problems surfaced by themselves. One product had a full name, a short name and an internal nickname in Chinese; on the Spanish side matters were livelier still, with a literal rendering here, an old transliteration carried over from previous packaging there, and in one place a product family name treated as the product name. Model numbers needed care too: the position of a hyphen or the case of a letter points to a different specification. In the units column, cartons and pieces were being used interchangeably on two documents, which would pull any value calculation out of shape.
We fixed a few rules first. The product name would follow the certificate; the family name would be listed separately rather than folded into it. Model numbers would be copied character for character, with no tidying up "while we were at it". Units would follow the packing list, and the manuals would be changed to match. Accent marks and gender and number agreement would follow the writing conventions of the target market. Once that was settled, we sent it back for confirmation and asked the client to nominate which file was the reference version. The step looks slow, yet it removed an entire round of rework later. Mr Hu remarked afterwards, half in jest, that one comparison table was worth more than three pages of translation; the phrasing was rough but the point was sound.
With a stamp over the lines, layout is harder than wording
The scanned pages were the genuinely trying part. A seal sat across a table rule, and recognition produced stray symbols; on another sheet a handwritten note ran diagonally through the product-name column, and one letter had been half swallowed by the edge of the stamp. A newer colleague's first instinct was to fill the gap from context, and was stopped. With papers like these one does not guess, because a wrong guess propagates through the whole packet. Our method was to check the image field by field, highlight anything uncertain, gather it into one list of questions and send that back, even if it cost half a day of waiting.
Layout had to be restored as well. Certificates, invoices and packing lists each have their own order of fields, and the translation has to sit back in the original cells rather than drifting because a Spanish string is longer than its Chinese source. Table headers must repeat across page breaks, and reference numbers, seal positions and the sequence of footnotes all have to be preserved. Anyone who has spent time on document translation understands that the client needs a file which can be dropped straight into a submission, not a passage that reads well. The printer was busy for two days: one sheet out, one sheet checked, since misaligned lines are far easier to see on paper than on a screen.
What the scheduling meeting actually argued about was what to deliver first
Twenty or thirty thousand characters is not a small batch, so we split it by document type: one group for the shipping papers, one for the manuals, one for the declarations. Each group ran through the glossary first and was then cross-reviewed. The disagreement concerned the order of delivery. The client wanted the manuals first for typesetting, but the product names in them had not yet been finally confirmed. Mr Tang argued for delivering the shipping papers first, because the certificate and invoice are the anchor of the whole packet; once the anchor is fixed, the rest of the wording has something to refer to. After half an hour of debate we went with that order and delivered in two instalments.
There was one hitch. The client wrote back to say they would like a smoother phrasing for a promotional line on the outer packaging. The change itself was simple; the complication was that the same phrase appeared in a manual heading and on a label. Mr Wang handled it in a very practical way: lift that single item out, ask whether only the packaging was to change or all three occurrences, and once "all three" was confirmed, issue a new version of the glossary and refresh the entire batch, discarding any old copy anyone still had in hand. There were a few more small exchanges of the same kind, none of them serious, but for each one somebody had to write down what had changed and from which version onward.
A small stack of personal papers that came with it
Near the end the client sent over a short stack of photocopies. Some technicians might be coming later to commission the equipment; they would handle the formalities themselves, but could we translate the accompanying papers while we were at it? There were a handful of dispatch letters, employment letters and evidence of funds, few in words but varied in format. We take that kind of work, and we do only the part that belongs to us: render the text into Chinese, align the layout, and where needed apply our registered translation seal. Everything else the client arranges themselves; we neither touch it nor promise anything about it.
What made those pages worth attention was their relationship to the earlier batch. Names, company name, job title and dates had to match the wording used in the shipping documents rather than being translated afresh. visa supporting document translation and work permit document translation look like small jobs, yet the most common error is precisely one person appearing with three spellings across three sheets. We folded these pages into the same glossary and cross-checked them against the shipping group at review before signing them off.
On delivery day there was one extra draft on the desk
The draft "just to look at" was not among the files we sent. It stayed on the desk and eventually went into the shredder. Not because it was badly translated, but because it had been produced before the glossary was settled, and keeping it would have left a hazard behind. After the two-person review we filed the comparison table, the list of questions and the version log together with the project. Clients rarely ask for those items, but when the next batch arrives they save half a day.
Mr Wang closed the job with an ordinary sort of remark: the client wants speed, and someone has to carry the risk that comes just after it. Nobody in the office replied; a few colleagues simply cleared their desks while it grew dark outside. The certificate of origin issued in half a day in our industry piece is much the same story: the smoother the front end, the more reason for somebody at the back to slow down for a moment. As for why even a decimal point deserves that pause, the translator piece on that comma puts it better than we can.