What distinguishes someone who merely translates from a professional translator? To me, this is the central question at the heart of Talent (Vendor) Management.
A Talent Management Office is a way for Language Service Providers to free up their Project Managers to concentrate on project management and instead have a dedicated department that handles all duties related to managing Talent. Both of these jobs involve juggling a lot of tasks, and both are vitally important for keeping a LSP running. By splitting up the role, PMs are free to make sure that projects get done properly and on time, and TMs can concentrate on onboarding the best Talent available and mitigating risk to the LSP.
I became a translator almost accidentally, because I spent many years in Russia and as a bilingual native English speaker, it was a natural fit. I was able to obtain a full-time in-house position, working in a domain that I loved–art. When I decided to move back to the United States, however, I realized that I wasn’t sure how to take my translation career to the next level. I knew I could translate, but I did not know what presenting myself as a full-time professional translator outside of a in-house position would entail. (This was one of the reasons I decided to apply to MIIS.)
While on the surface, the goal was to prepare us to hire translators, learning about Talent Management also helped me understand what I need to do to be a professional translator. What are my data security policies? Is my resume vulnerable to translation scammers? I do not currently work in a domain where NDAs apply–but I need to prepared for when I do. We learned what we need to be aware of as Talent Managers, but the Talent also needs to be up to date on what the best practices are in the translation industry.
As people trained in Talent Management, we can now model these best practices on both sides of the Talent/Talent Manager relationship. I can tell my colleagues why they do not want their resumes readily available online, especially in .docx format. I can point out that it is not a great idea to do one’s work over public wifi. When translation work comes my way that I cannot handle myself, I can make sure that the translators to whom I am passing this work along also maintain these standards.
The translation industry is one that has been radically altered by advances in technology, and not just in the way that people outside of the industry think, with AI and machine translation. The advent of the internet has changed the way translators work entirely. With the added convenience of being able to do research online and send and receive work through the internet comes added complications to consider. The omnipresence of the cloud and ability of nefarious actors to access data are things that the contemporary translation professional absolutely has to take into consideration.
To that end, throughout the semester, our teams for our group projects maintained “risk registers”–a list of potential risks that Talent could pose to a LSP, i.e., putting client intellectual property somewhere where it could be vulnerable to hackers. We kept out list in mind as we wrote out policies and procedures in our Talent Management Office Manual in Process Street. Being a Talent Manager is more than just about finding people who will do a good job translating your clients’ work. It is also about finding people who do not a pose a risk to either the LSP or the client, and who understand what it means to work professionally in this industry. Understanding the perspective of the Talent Manager is invaluable for people on both sides of the equation.