You’re in charge of a multilingual project. How can you ensure smooth communication?

To manage a multilingual project, it is important to fully understand the English source and to foresee potential problems in different languages (for example: gender agreement in some languages and the sequence differences in them). This way, when receiving the source content, you may be able to filter certain aspects in advance.

You can create a chat group on Slack or similar solutions to make sure the entire team can communicate easily at any time. This encourages everyone to discuss their concerns and findings with the rest of the team.

Des outils de gestion et d’organisations des taches sont également d’une grand aide pour suivre les progrès et faciliter la coordination entre les membres de l’équipe.

Fundamentals: - Set communication protocols: Establish clear guidelines for frequency, response times, and reporting issues. - Cultural sensitivity: Be mindful of cultural differences in communication styles and avoid assumptions. - Organize virtual team-building activities to encourage collaboration and build rapport. - Use a platform for team members to share best practices, resources, and cultural insights. - Use visual aids: Diagrams, and screenshots to enhance understanding, especially for complex concepts. - Invest in language training: Consider providing language training for team members who need to communicate in additional languages. - Celebrate successes: Recognize and celebrate milestones and achievements to boost team morale.

Each project can check your possibility of organizing processes and people. Multilingual teams should choose one common language for task management and project performance. For such projects, I prefer to have a task management tool and one messenger for communication. We all can use translation software to be sure that our messages are accurate. Moreover, if it is English, we can use Grammarly for proofreading.

Clearly defining the project's scope and goals from the start helps to avoid misunderstandings and guide decision-making. Share this information with all team members to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Tenir des réunions régulières pour discuter des progrès, résoudre les problèmes éventuels et s’assurer que tous les membres de l’équipe sont sur la même longueur d’onde est un must.

To avoid confusion, assign roles and responsibilities clearly. Make sure everyone knows their tasks, their role within the team and whom they should report to.

In my experience, managing such a kind of projects requires coordination between the team and the project manager should be able to assign roles, monitor, coordinate, and deliver. A team manager is preferred to be aware of the work flow and capacity of each member of the team, assign roles that are suitable to each of them, make sure to collect glossaries from the team and coordinate them, help with terminology if needed (if the project manager is the senior translator), provide the appropriate TM (if using one of the CAT tools), encourage the team to communicate and monitor their progress by using a simple chat tool (for example WhatsApp), and make sure that he/she collects the work at least 2 days ahead delivery to avoid any mistakes.

It's easier to keep on track of a project if each member of the team knows exactly their roles and responsibilities. In this way we can align expectation and then after that provide goals and keep on the good communication between teams or in different Roles

également, il faut établir un glossaire et une mémoire de traduction, pour garantir la cohérence terminologique tout au long du projet.

Always provide context for all communications and tasks. Detailed instructions, guidelines, and any background information necessary should be shared to prevent any ambiguities.

Regularly test your communication strategy and validate that everyone understands their tasks and that the information is being correctly interpreted. This can be done through feedback sessions, surveys, or regular check-ins.

Use reviews and feedback to identify any communication hiccups and to make necessary improvements. Also, be open to changes and adaptations to meet the project's needs.

Each project is as much as a challenge and opportunity. What if the context is a highly technical engineering project for example with you have no idea or experience about. Here is your opportunity to learn new terminologies and develop new glossaries. Always remember the principle that “nothing is untranslatable”. Even if you don’t have the time to develop a glossary, make sure to prepare a bilingual version for your reference so that you can learn and go back for when necessary. The challenge can be overcome by doing a lot of research using the correct research tools, asking source people and seeking source materials.

Consider time zone differences when scheduling meetings or setting deadlines. Provide translation or interpretation services if necessary. Most importantly, foster a respectful, inclusive environment where everyone feels valued and heard. Multilingual projects require patience, flexibility, and consideration for cultural differences

Optimise your process. Management systems help you define and assign the different phases of the project and the roles involved in each one. The optimisation through automatic notifications, relevant communication and scheduled updates are key in managing a successful multilingual project. Choose the right people. The beginning of this article suggests choosing the right tools and while this can be an asset, choosing the right professionals for the project is what makes the difference.