A day in the life of Joana Alarcão
Hello, World!
My name is Joana, and I am a Translation Line Manager from Portugal. What does that mean? Simply put I oversee a translation team. And what does my day-to-day look like? Well, it’s quite varied. Our Language Delivery teams at RWS are responsible for production. This encompasses linguistic tasks, on a particular target language, for a very wide range of clients – my team handles all things marketing, retail, IT and gaming for European Portuguese. We translate, post-edit, review and proofread content for some well-known clients, so it is definitely rewarding to see our translations out in the world. We also carry out many other related tasks, linguistic advising, linguistic testing, copy-editing and overall linguistic quality. In the past few years the range of tasks requested from clients has expanded greatly, so long gone are the days where being a translator meant just translating.
RWS in general, and my team in particular, are very fast paced. We work with short turnaround times, doing our best to deliver top quality at all times. In these evolving times for the industry, we must keep up with new demands and there is always something new to learn.
As a Line Manager, I occasionally contribute to production, although my main focus is ensuring the team has the right conditions to perform at their best. In practice, this means distributing work in a balanced way amongst our in-house and external resources, helping with technical issues, solving problems, training new in-house and external resources and, with the help of our Quality Manager, overseeing quality. Something I also enjoy doing is training new people, be it the interns we receive every year or the new colleague who just joined the company. It’s definitely very rewarding to see someone grow and become ever more autonomous in their work and that is also a big part of leading a team, it’s all a matter of balance between letting people be independent, and sometimes failing, while ensuring our deliveries to the end client are not affected by it.
Problem-solving is also another big part of my job, there is always some issue that throws us off our balance and there is always something that needs to be optimized. I particularly enjoy thinking of solutions to operational challenges that will help the whole team improve their workflow, so we can focus on providing linguistic value to clients.
So, what do my days look like? There are no two days alike and each new one presents new challenges, but also new rewards. Being surrounded by a great team of enthusiastic and capable people is definitely one of the greatest parts of the job, and no machine will ever replace that! 😊