The Importance of Hand Off in Translation or How To Avoid Ripping Up Concrete

A friend and a mentor of mine owns a construction company. A lot of their work is in pouring concrete. Lots of it. The roadways, bridges and buildings they build each represent a multimillion dollar project. One of the most important steps in their process is “hand off”. This is where the head office communicates to the field crew exactly what needs to be done, where, when and how. If even a smallest detail of such specifications gets lost in this communication, it may result in ripping up concrete. An expensive, utterly unnecessary exercise, and a failure to execute, as you can imagine.

When I heard my friend speak about this I thought of our own industry and how very important “Hand Off” is for us. I never thought translation and pouring concrete had that much in common. From the process standpoint, they clearly do.

Hand off matters, even though our projects do not reach millions of dollars in value. We would not want to find out that we translated your document into Portuguese instead of French because someone did not pay attention to your specifications. We would rather avoid being late and missing an important deadline of yours. And what good would it be for you to receive your document in MS Word when you asked for a Power Point document? All these mistakes require expensive time to be fixed and we all hate rework.

“Hand off” that is 100% successful has become one of the key performance indicators we now measure. “No rework” is the mantra of our Project Managers and their translation teams as they work their way through dozens of different projects each week and juggle the specifics of each. We are finding new ways of communicating and confirming that our messages were received and our instructions understood.

Staying with the concrete theme, we are making sure that our clients travel with us on an Autobahn where the traffic moves quickly and yet smoothly, safely and predictably. The back roads that are full of pot holes, detours and “under construction” signs are not for us.

What does Hand Off look like in your industry?