By far the most comprehensive, demanding and rewarding Translation and Interpretation Team Management project in my career has been working with the project on the implementation of an Integrated Project Management System (IPMS) in LUKOIL, Russian largest private oil company, under a contract with WorleyParsons, an Australian global engineering firm.
Over a span of 5 years, from 2010 to 2015, I managed an external contractor team of 8 highly qualified professional interpreters and translators working from different locations to serve the Customer’s most important corporate project at that time.
The home base of the project was in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and this is where the bulk of interpretation work under the project took place. Our team provided consecutive and simultaneous interpretation at daily meetings, weekly workshops and numerous project management trainings and conferences. We provided over 200 hours of interpretation per month.
The translation part of the project required us to translate project management documentation, manuals, procedures, internal memos and other documents on an ongoing basis. At the peak of the project we translated approximately 1,500 pages per month.
The IPMS project was prioritized by the company’s management, decisions were made fast, and had to be communicated to the thousands of company employees all over the world. Thus, the translation turnaround times were also of the essence.
The project’s characteristics and budgetary constraints did not allow us to keep all team members on-site in the UAE. Thus, a rotation system was developed, whereby 2 interpreters/translators were to be located in the customer’s offices in Dubai at all times, and the rest of the team was working from their home bases in Russia, Uzbekistan and Canada.
Team members were selected based on their professional qualifications and physical location – the time zone differences allowed us to provide the fastest translation turnaround times for the customer.
Every three months we would rotate, and the two interpreters/translators in Dubai would be replaced by the other two team members. This assured optimal exposure of team members to the project dynamics, broke the monotony of working remotely on the same project for an extended period of time, and enabled our team members to keep an optimal life & work balance.
To ensure consistency and high quality of translation, the team used Trados Translation Memory software with access kindly provided by the Customer’s translation department. Throughout project execution, we have had the privilege of working side-by-side with the customer’s own translation department and learned a lot from their fantastic specialized petroleum industry linguists.
As the team leader and the head interpreter for the project, I was responsible for all team management tasks, including initial recruitment, retention and training of team members. I was also responsible for all contractual and financial matters in dealing with the customer. I was responsible for developing and maintaining the rotation scheme and I was ultimately accountable for quality and timeliness of all translation and interpretation services.
Needless to say, over the nearly 5 years of project execution I provided hundreds of hours of interpretation and translated thousands of pages for the Customer and enriched my professional knowledge thanks to the 100% extended immersion in the petroleum industry language and dynamics. This has been the most challenging and the most rewarding linguistic and team management experience of my life. I have grown both as an interpreter and translator, and as a translation project manager. Importantly, I have worked with fantastic people, including customer representatives and my team members.