An outline on how translation project management might be carried out: a sample translation project by translation&interpreting students at Dumlupınar University in Turkey

Abstract

Abstract The translation phenomenon has been a means of meeting communication needs among people throughout history. The intensity of translation has been increasing in connection with globalization and the digitalization processes, impacting many areas of life. Accordingly, the position of translation in the development of disciplines and in understanding and recognizing cultures by one another is undeniable. Whereas translation activity was once an act that a single translator could perform, nowadays, texts on many products and services are translated into different languages to respond more quickly to the expectations of consumers and users of different languages. That is why translation has gone beyond being purely an individual activity and has become teamwork. From this point on, there are cases that the translation task has become a project on which more than one person works because different specialists must serve as team members to complete a project successfully. For example, even though having a single translator within a translation project of a website allows the words to be translated, re-positioning of the images, the presence of circumstances where the graphic design needs to be changed, re-creating the company slogans, post-editing and making the translation ready for the user, determining which segments will be translated in coded parts, etc. require various specialists such as graphic designers, post-editors, technical writers, localization engineers, coders and so forth. In this way, errors or problems that might occur during the translation project can be detected during revisions or mutual teamwork. Besides, in this way, the individual responsibility of the translator or other team members can turn into a collective responsibility, which means that the translation project is a team-based effort rather than a tiring cognitive process. To this end, the project management and translation project management concepts were described in this study. The details of a sample translation project were explained in the core section, and how the project management might be done was explained. It is thought that if the steps determined for the sample project are followed during the translation task, the translation projects can become more productive and successful instead of a tiring process. Keywords: Project, translation project, sample translation project, translation act.