Virtual Team Project – Week 7
This week, the translation team worked away on the translation and the French graphics. They now have an almost final draft which requires some editing and formatting. However, my fears about the graphics have materialised.
When the translation team said they would take care of the French graphics, I was on the fence.
On one hand, they are in the best position to get the most accurate French screenshots, because they are accessing each screen during the translation. Also, they know both languages so they can easily match the French to the English, whereas our graphics designer is Irish and may not have the necessary level in French to do that matching work as quickly. I am sure he could do it, but it would take more time.
On the other hand, graphics design is another complex task that requires specific skills and tools. It’s one thing to dabble in Photoshop and to know how to edit photos and how to create simple drawings, it’s another thing to create elaborate graphics from screenshots and to be able to replicate the same process multiple times.
I had to create localised graphics as a project manager and maybe my more than inadequate skills in graphics design influence my opinion, but I think the graphics design skills should take precedence in graphics localisation. Give the designer the right screenshots and you should be fine. Give a non-designer the right design tools and I’m not sure you will get the right results. The non-designer might do great work, but it will be harder to recreate identical designs.
Nevertheless, the translation team showed a lot of confidence that they could take care of the graphics, so I decided not to push my preferences. This is one aspect of teamwork that might be the hardest to manage. Knowing when you should push back and impose a decision vs knowing when to take a step back and accept that other options might work just as well.
Today’s experience is timely. The person I interviewed for our interview assignment yesterday mentioned this as one of the biggest challenges of leading a team. In a team, everyone is an expert in an area and values their own input. One of the project manager’s jobs is to balance these egos, including his/her own. And I don’t mean “ego” in a negative, self-centered sense.
Our timeframe played a significant role in my decision. If we had to turn around the translation and the localised graphics within a few days only, I would have tried to impose the graphics designer option. However, this assignment is about honing our collaboration skills and trying new working strategies – and we had four weeks. Also, we agreed that the graphics designer would review the graphics and might intervene if necessary.
This weekend, the translation team shared their draft with localised graphics. The graphics are of high quality, with a good resolution and some interesting ideas, but they are very different from the source graphics. I had not anticipated this. It was obvious to me that the localised graphics should be identical to the source graphics (except for the text, obviously). However, the translators did their own thing here. I have never seen localised graphics that are completely different from the source graphics except when the available localised content is also completely different, which does not happen that much. I do wonder if that might happen more than what I have experienced…
This particular project is a valuable experiment in graphics design if only because it shows that different designers may come up with highly different graphics to showcase the same information, and all options may be valid. Still, with only one week left, we cannot spend more time experimenting. Other team members agreed that our graphics designer should take care of the localised graphics in order to ensure a consistent look across languages, and the translation team has provided him with the screenshots. We are now on the last stretch of this project and everything seems under control. We do not have any other “experiment” in progress, so I am cautiously confident.
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