If there’s one thing every new translator should know, it’s that you should never be afraid to ask questions. Far from being unwilling to answer queries – or even being irritated by them – most clients actually appreciate being asked the right questions. It shows that you know your field and are making the effort to do the job properly.

In our blog article, we discuss this issue in detail. The right questions to ask and why they matter – and, of course, what you can do to try to answer them for yourself, saving time for everyone involved. As important as it is to feel free to ask questions, there’s no sense in wasting your client’s time with unnecessary ones.

So why is it so important to ask questions like these? Aside from the fact that it’s better to get things right first time than to guess and hope for the best, it’s possible you’ll even spot something the client missed or forgot about. Because translation is such a specialised field, some issues simply might never occur to the client until you raise them. Which variant of a given language should you be translating into? What format would they like the work to be delivered in – and, if it requires layout or other extra work, can you do anything to help them out with it? Who does the client want to reach with this text, and how will that affect the way you write it?

Finally, we also discuss localisation issues – the kinds of problems that aren’t strictly linguistic in nature, but which instead cover the kinds of practical considerations that come with transferring a document to a brand new market. After all, a good translator also thinks about things like currencies, time zones and local expectations – the kinds of things that turn a simple translated text into a fully localised document. More.

This is the summary of an article published in the translation blog of Translators Family, under the title What to ask your client before starting a translation, by Oleg Semerikov and Translators Family.

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