My greatest frustration as a translation project manager is not correcting mistakes or polishing style. It’s dealing with “pinhead” translators. “Pinhead” is the worst recommendation an Israeli employer can give his worker. It means a person focusing narrowly on his responsibilities, never taking the time to take a step back and look at the big picture of the project.
The other day, a translator returned a document full of tables as plain text. When I called his attention to formatting, he had this to say:
“Re formatting, your initial posting does not explicitly mention formatting as part of the deliverables.”
Sigh!
