September 19, 2007
My volunteer translation for a J-E translation workshop
A few months back, I volunteered to do a translation for a Japanese-to-English (J-E) translation workshop. The idea was to go over several translations of a book passage, critiquing and hopefully learning something from them.
The field was management consulting, which I know next to nothing about, but I figured it would be good critique fodder, so I went for it.
I got the workshop's feedback on my translation the other day, so I'm posting the first half of the original here, along with my translation, reflecting some of the feedback.
Page 1:
Page 2:
My translation:
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Can you describe the issue and how to resolve it in thirty seconds?
When you're riding the elevator at your client's company, you never know when the CEO is going to get on with you. You have about thirty seconds until you reach the first floor; in that time, you've got to be able to concisely describe the company's current situation, its issues, and a way to solve them.
When I started working at a management consultancy, that's the first lesson that they drilled into me. The main job of a management consultancy is to propose company-wide solutions for the companies that hire us — our clients.
You carry out a series of steps in order to do this: you build hypotheses, investigate and analyze the current situation, identify issues, find ways to solve them, and develop recommendations.
Depending on the issue, this project could take several months. During this time, you spend long hours at the client site collecting data, interviewing the people involved and gathering material, and holding discussions at countless meetings.
Over the course of a several-month project, you actually hardly ever run into executives outside of scheduled meetings, in the elevator or otherwise. But my employer believed that we should continually form a narrative telling the most important story from our current understanding of the company's situation, and be prepared to tell this narrative at any time. I actually think that this is an invaluable exercise, because it teaches you to continually sort out the facts in your head, and be ready to say what you consider to be the best ideas about them at any given moment.
And you've got a time limit of thirty seconds. In order to reach this goal in just thirty seconds, you have to fully assimilate the situation, and hit just the essentials. Thirty seconds is enough time to say about a hundred words, so it's not too short to give a summary.
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