Put yourself in the customer's shoes: when you get a speeding ticket, you don't want the attorney you hire to take care of it to bombard you with acronyms and stuff you don't understand. All you want to know is what you need to do to get the ticket off your record. We feel the same way about our roles in clients' lives: we want to solve their problems as opposed to making things more complicated by showing off (intentionally or not) jargon that's meaningless to clients. This seems like a no-brainer, but it's amazing how many service providers cannot get themselves to explain processes in a simple, straight-forward way (several of our CPAs come to mind here). When dealing with your own clients, our advice is to make things as easy on them as possible -- after all, they are not translators or interpreters, and they don't need to be: that's why they have you.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this!
5 comments:
I'm with you, 100 o/o . Eschew obfuscation!! ;-)
Rosemary
@Rosemary: thanks for commenting. We bet you are an attorney who can explain things without using too much legalese, huh? ;)
Once again, the Dagmar sisters have really hit the nail on the head! I think we translators can be so immersed in our own world and love translation so much that we forget there are people out there who don't even realize that translation is an industry
In my experience, most clients consider translation merely a necessity, like getting the copier fixed. They want someone who can take a file off their hands and come back in a week with the finished product -- they want to set it and forget it!
I just submitted a comment to your "Keep it Simple" blog post but I accidentally hit enter before I was ready. My name should appear as "Andie" if you are able to change it. Thanks!
@Andie: thanks for your comment! Unfortunately, we cannot edit comments, only approve/delete, so we just approved both your comments. And you are so right: customers want their language problems solved, and we are all here to do it for them.
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