Balance Between Quality And Time Management In Translation Teams

Project management capacity is crucial to translation teams. As the core elements, the time and quality management as well as their balance determine the outcome of the project. This paper aims to study the strategies for different teams in striking for the balance. It elaborates four real projects of two teams, i.e. the translation vendor (YES Cooperative) and the in-house translation team within a company (Translation Services Center in Johnson and Johnson), and summarizes their practices for balance respectively. Besides, through horizontal and vertical comparison, this paper is expected to probe the possibility for optimization.After summarizing the fundamental theories of project management, this paper focuses on the organizational structure of the team and the roles and responsibilities of the project manager, so as to analyze the differences between the cooperative and in-house team in terms of personnel structure, major project type, tools and technology, project procedure and output efficiency. Based on previous studies on quality assessment and speed estimation, this paper is able to quantify key data in quality and time management. With detailed introduction to the four projects, it compares the data vertically and horizontally and reviews the balance practice for each. Then best practices for two teams are concluded with suggestions for better time and quality management provided, hopefully applicable to other similar teams.