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3.2 The Gentle Art of Managing a Translation Team

It is not our ambition to describe all activities involved in managing a team—it’s very likely that you will encounter new problems, take care of tasks nobody else is aware of, or invent new techniques and approaches in your quest to keep things running. Managing a team is a hard task on all counts: communication with others, recruiting volunteers (and keeping them as long as possible), defending certain decisions, leading discussions about terminology issues, handling personal conflicts within the team, technical skills when reviewing/merging/syncing translations, etc. The list goes on and on.

This manual can only summarize some of the most common issues and suggest ways to deal with them. It is up to the team leader to establish the precise team procedures and practices.

The trans-coord-discuss@gnu.org mailing list was specifically created to discuss issues that leaders encounter while managing the teams, and for general organizational work. Feel free to discuss anything related to the translation process there.

It is strongly recommended that translation teams attempt to recruit native English speakers in order to improve their translation process. Translators sometimes misunderstand English idioms and expressions, and as a result, they translate them incorrectly or in ways that are suboptimal and confusing. These errors are trivial to discover for the native English speaker.