What do you mean, "urgent?"

Some businesses in the gig economy, especially within translation, like to call everything "urgent"

Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash

In some businesses, “urgent” really means something important — like in the medical care, where people may die if you are not dealing with a problem fast enough.

In other businesses, “urgent” is being used to stress employees to work faster than possible in the belief that the business will then make more money.

So, which of the two situations can best describe translation agencies?

A request ticks in

Maybe you also work like this:

During the day, emails are ticking in with requests for availability. Various translation agencies have one or another small task — or “project”, as they most often call it — and it is offered to you with a bit of information about the number of words, language pair, required CAT¹ tool, etc. — and a deadline.

Now, deadlines in this business are often tight. From the task info you can calculate a needed amount of time for the task, for instance two hours, and the suggested deadline is in two and a half hour. Dang, there goes the lunch break…

You reply immediately, and you are asking for a small extension of the deadline because you are right now working on another task. Maybe you are lucky, and it will be granted, so that you can deliver this in the evening, at 10. Or early the next morning. In general, without much consideration for your need to also have a life.

These agencies are not made of time, that’s for sure. They may of course work on a tight schedule because of the many steps a project must go through², often including initial preparation of the project, gathering a team of translators, proofreaders, and quality approvers, and then seek to fit in a bit of slack time in between all the individual tasks, to accommodate for delays and needed error corrections along the way.

So, even under normal circumstances, every step of a typical translation project will have a short deadline.

The urgency

But then it happens, and quite often: something went wrong. Maybe the originally assigned translator called off the task or simply didn’t deliver and is now impossible to get in touch with, or maybe the client called and asked for a faster process.

The agency project manager know no better than to email the usual suspects — those translators who often say yes to this kind of requests— starting with “URGENT”.

In case of no reply within a few minutes, another email is sent, stressing that this really is urgent.

And as you are a kind person who cannot bear to see this stressed project manager suffering, you say yes and take over the hardship.

Fake urgency

Sometimes, there is something fishy in the whole affair! Let me give you an example:

A few days ago, I got an email at the end of the working day, having a headline such as “We need your help to evaluate a complaint”.

I often do such things for the translation agencies, most often when a client had an alternative translation made that was different from the first one, and therefore it is automatically believed that the first one is wrong. Or when a QA evaluation process has shown that several segments of the translation could better have been translated differently.

What happens then is that I look at the evaluator’s suggestions and try to qualify them — are they pointing out real problems, are they more of a preferential nature, or are they perhaps outright wrong?

But it was the end of the day, so I didn’t look further into it right away. The next morning, before I had even switched on the computer, another email had appeared, and then a few minutes later yet another, using the word “URGENT” several times. When I saw that, I had a quick look — and was baffled!

It turned out that this was about a translation I had done more than half a year earlier. I had heard nothing since, forgotten all about it.

Now, half a year later, the client took a look at the translation and decided to complain about it, as two phrases apparently weren’t correctly translated — or so said their alternative translator, who was the one taking a look at it.

For whatever reason, they found that they could spend half a year on getting back, and then still demand a reply within the hour!

Well, I did push away all other tasks, looked into it and found that the first complained-about sentence was as good or as bad as any, and their suggestion wasn’t any better. There was no error, no improvement needed, and their suggestion was simply just a matter of someone’s preference. The second sentence was outright wrong in the new shape — grammatically correct, but claiming something, a feature of a product, that the original text didn’t mention at all.

I wrote that back to the agency, and the project manager responded with a “thanks,” and I have heard nothing after that (but maybe in another six months?)

So what was the urgency?

Reasons for fake urgencies

As indicated previously, some people simply like to call everything urgent, feeling more powerful this way or believing that it is needed for those “lazy” translators to do things within a reasonable timeframe.

I have seen this often, when I reject a proposed task because I cannot deliver within the required deadline — then, most often, the deadline can be moved a day or two, or even a week or two. And if the project manager cannot agree on that directly, they will ask the client, who almost always says yes.

So the urgency isn’t an urgency after all, it is just a word used to put pressure on people.

Another situation can occur, which I have seen many times when working internally in companies — even though it is rarely visible to me when working as an independent, external contractor — where a task is put into someone’s inbox (once there were physical inboxes on every desk, now it is more of a metaphor), and will just sit there for a while, waiting for someone to pay attention to it — after which it is often moved, without being handled, to someone else’s inbox, and things repeat from there.

After a long while, some manager is shouting about too long processing times in general, or perhaps even specifically about the project to which this translation belongs, and suddenly someone or someone else gets busy doing something.

And then the sh*t ends up with someone third, usually the translation agency, who will get blamed for something. Since playing the blame game will often work, now it all ends up being defined as a remote, anonymous and presumed incompetent translator’s fault.

Being more reasonable

Imagine that a hospital would call everything urgent, so that doctors and nurses would have to drop everything they had in their hands every second minute to start working on something else.

Then all patients would probably die.

This is, more or less, what happens in a company culture — or an agency culture — where almost everything is called urgent.

Of course, translations do happen in such a culture, but often they happen a little too fast, so that there is not enough time to check the details and make them perfect. Even if the task and the target text do not die off completely, they do suffer some injuries.

And how often is the translation really needed that fast?

Well, most marketing campaigns and other business activities are being prepared and take place over a long period, and I often translate material that was written half a year earlier, or which is even older and just was found in a drawer somewhere, now needed as a starting point for a new copywriting project.

There has been plenty of time for having that translation made, but it was postponed to the last minute, suddenly making it urgent.

And, as mentioned before, sometimes the result really isn’t needed anytime soon.

In some cases, though, you will see a real urgency — like the translation of medical records as part of a hospital treatment, or documents needed during the processing of some legal actions for which people are held in custody, with a need for some action being taken quickly.

But how many percent of the total amount of translations are of this kind? 10%? 5%?

The best way to deal with things would be to call only them urgent — and let the rest be planned in the best possible way, setting deadlines that allow for a good job to be done.

How do we get there?

1. A CAT tool is a Computer Aided Translation tool — a specialized piece of software that can assist you in the process of working your way through a translation, helping to ensure consistency and an efficient way of working.

2. I wrote about what a translation project often consists of in All the Details of a Translation Project at my other substack, Technical Writing by Inidox.