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Corporate Scribe
The Savage Plant Some time ago I noticed a small odd-looking plant on her desk. It was a Venus flytrap, she said. The edges of the almond-shaped leaves look like the teeth of a comb. Because the leaves are set in pairs, they resemble fuzzy cupped hands. In the wild, when an unsuspecting bug lands inside one of the hands the leaves spring shut, and the projections on each leaf join to cleverly trap it.
Indoors, of course, there aren't many flying insects (see “The Horsefly and the Badminton Racket”), but the plant needs to be fed. Finding a box elder bug on the window, the marketing coordinator deftly used tweezers to lower it into one of the leaf pairs. We were all mesmerized watching the trap spring and the bug disappear. Sunday evening I stopped by the office to pick up a file. My daughter and her 3-year-old were with me, and I was anxious to entertain them with the new addition to the office. I didn't have tweezers with me, but my fine motor skills are above average. With my fingertips I caught another box elder bug from outside, and, while my granddaughter watched entranced, I dropped it into the plant. Snap! went the leaves. "Ugh! Ick!" my daughter and I said as the plant captured only half of the bug, leaving the head sticking out, feelers frantically waving. I don't know where the spring release is on a Venus flytrap, and neither did my daughter. We picked up the 3-year-old -- who was yelling, “The bug is stuck! The bug is stuck!” -- and fled. The following Monday morning I heard our Marketing Coordinator say, “That's interesting. I wonder why it only caught half the bug?” I went to look. “It's still there,” I gasped. I had assumed the bug would be gone overnight. No. It had managed to pull about ¾ of its body out of the grip of the plant, although it did look faded. My colleague looked at me and said, “What did you do to my plant?!” When I confessed, she shook her head, pulled the bug out of the plant with her tweezers and firmly placed it in the center of another set of leaves, where it was trapped completely. Somehow it seemed all right when I could no longer see it. “By the way,” I asked, “exactly how does the plant eat the bug?” She fixed me with a stare. “A long, slow, painful acid bath.” Is there an SPCB — Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Bugs? Return to top of page
Recently we received a notice of impending cancellation due to non-payment from our homeowner's insurance agency. We have been their customers for 15 years and have never missed a payment. The reason they hadn’t received our check was simple: we never received the bill. They were the ones who didn’t get paid, and yet I was the one who was angry.
Why? Reasonably enough, I thought a 15-year relationship warranted a reminder phone call, a note, a postcard -- something other than a cancellation notice. I resented being treated like a deadbeat, and the note I sent back with our check said so in no uncertain terms. If this is the way they treat a customer like me, what sort of notice do they send to a bad customer? Or can't they tell the difference? I was reminded of the professor who led my International Business German Exam preparation classes. She taught us that the slow payment, the late payment, and even the non-payment were opportunities to build our relationship with the client. As part of that class we composed reminder letters of varying tone, learning nuances used in the German business world. The first overdue notice was not an overdue notice at all, but rather a special sales event announcement or an offer to a valued customer. The last sentence touched obliquely on the outstanding balance. The next letter highlighted a service the customer used recently, and the single reminder sentence moved up to the lower third of the letter. Perhaps half a dozen steps preceded an actual ”Hey, buddy, pay your bill” letter. Even then, our professor said the tone should be one of sorrow that such a good customer had somehow forgotten a payment. She called her method an easy way to keep existing customers and simultaneously build a reputation for customer care. Her statistics on payments received using this method have slipped from my mind along with some of the more obscure German banking terms, but her theory impressed all of us. I imagine we’re not the only company sometimes using her pattern of letters (usually in English). After all, a late payment can have many possible explanations. People forget, mail goes missing, invoices are misrouted. Sometimes the customer doesn't know payment hasn't been made. More often than not our first-level note brings not only a check but also a request for another quote. The cancellation notice we received reaffirmed my commitment to treat our customers the way we'd like to be treated. Not only is that the morally correct path, it makes the most business sense. I don't think our insurance company is aware of how close they came to losing a customer. Return to top of page
It was bad enough when the program listed the first Christmas carol as “Away in a Manager,” but the secretary responsible turned red and sank down in her chair when the error was projected on giant overhead screens. People laughed and dismissed the mistake as human error. I felt that secretary’s pain.
Several years ago, we were completing a large, complicated translation for a new customer. The usual path for a translation is from translator to editor to proofreader. In this case, we had a fourth person double-check the document. The project was ready to leave the office when a fifth person walking casually past the desk said, “Aren’t you going to correct the typo in the headline?” For any company that publishes anything, the obvious goal is perfect, error-free copy. After the ideas are organized, after the text is lovingly and sometimes painfully produced, after the author is convinced the document is ready, the quality control team takes over. Thus editors and proofreaders find employment and spell-checking software exists for most languages. In the translation industry, the term “editor” is most often used for the second linguist who verifies the accuracy of the translation and polishes the language. The proofreader, coming third, then has the final responsibility for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and typos. In reality, everyone who handles a document in our office functions as a proofreader. Our clients want their source-language documents to be flawless as much as they want their translations to be, and most clients thank us when we tactfully point out errors in the document we are prepping for translation. I’m quietly glad when that happens because it reminds me that others wrestle with human error, too. In fact, the story about a prize offered for a perfect, typo-free book is legendary. No one ever collected the prize. Margins are tight in this business, and proofreaders are a budget line many agencies cut. But as hard as we work to select top-notch linguists who carefully check their own translations after a night’s sleep, we still allow everyone who works for us to be human. And that means an occasional mistake. Therefore we still insist that every document that leaves here goes through a full linguistic edit and proofreading. Pity the writers of daily newspapers, news crawls, closed captioning. Time doesn’t always allow for their work to be carefully edited. But who checks the checker? Every time a document is handled, the possibility arises that errors will be introduced. An editor correcting a typo may delete an extra letter or skip a comma. The proofreader may correct the punctuation and misplace that comma. Or the spell-check software may decide that “manger” should be replaced with “manager,” and the proofreader may not notice. Recently a client complained that a bullet point had been omitted in a 20,000-word translation. The translator (who also subcontracts for NASA) was mortified. The editor was chagrined. The two proofreaders absolutely swore they counted those bullets. I sighed, apologized profusely to the client, and inserted the bullet. Until the day when computers do the translating and writing, human error will be a factor. And even then, someone will have to check the computer code. Otherwise we may still have Baby Jesus sleeping in the manager. Return to top of page
When my husband and I built our new home years ago, the buy-the-shell-and-do-the-easy-finish-work-yourself approach seemed ideal for our limited budget.
We were young and thought we could do anything, but unfortunately, one of the first jobs was the rough-in of the underground plumbing in the basement. The baby was more or less happy in the playpen on the dirt floor, watching her parents struggle with how-to books and unfamiliar tools. Day by day, our mood migrated from anticipation of the results, to wonder at our daring, to uneasiness at the complexities of plumbing, to grim determination, to stubborn perseverance, to despair, anger, and yelling. I have a vivid memory of straddling a pipe, desperately trying to saw it off to the proper length, while our little one whimpered at the tension and my husband swore at one of the tools. My suggestion that he watch his language in front of the children was not met with enthusiasm; we ended up shouting, accompanied by a screaming baby. Unfortunately, a delegate from the local church women’s group chose that moment to poke her head into the hole leading down into the basement and ask if everything was OK. Good professional advice about what homeowners should and should not do, combined with the trained tradespeople we finally hired, eventually resulted in a completed home with no safety hazards. But my husband and I still haven’t completely lost that “How hard can it be?” attitude. Please don’t look closely at the trim around the complicated angles of the new cupboards. As for the new wallpaper in the breakfast room -– well, if I hang the valance just right, it doesn’t look crooked. I see that attitude in customers occasionally. My European colleagues report that in Europe, translation is a valued and respected profession — unless the translation is into English. Nearly everyone in Western Europe studies some English in school and therefore sees no reason why they can’t do the translation themselves. We’ve all seen those English translations, either on signs in Europe and Asia or in nearly incomprehensible package directions. Translation is still a mystery to many Americans. A caller recently asked me to just “look at the German and read the text in English so you won’t have to really translate it.” How hard can it be to look up a word in the dictionary and substitute the proper foreign word? Unfortunately, declensions, conjugations, synonyms, perfect-tense constructions, word order, cultural differences and regionalisms all make it very hard indeed at times. At Precision Language Services, we counsel clients about what they need translated. When a rough idea of the meaning is all they need, we point them to inexpensive web solutions or off-the-shelf software packages so they can do the easy work themselves. But we also tell them point-blank when they need a master plumber. And then we provide the tight, elegantly written work you expect from trained, experienced professionals who know just how hard it can be. Return to top of page.
If you want to live...
Don’t ask the barista to describe in detail every possible variation of the coffee drinks available at 6:30 on a Monday morning. The people behind you in line are already in a bad mood. When driving in the left lane at a sensible 40 mph, don't smile at the drivers passing you in the right lane. Their hand gesture is not a friendly wave. “Gee, ma’am, it shouldn’t do that” is not a good tech support response to someone who has been battling a computer problem for 6 hours. Strangely enough, most people know their computers shouldn’t do whatever it is they’re calling tech support about. Don’t fill out your life insurance application at the drive-thru at the bank. The driver of the 17th car behind you may make that insurance useful to your next of kin. Teach your dog what grass is his and what isn’t or some morning you will find a stinky surprise on your doorstep. Don’t take your day care charges to the grocery store for a lesson in choosing healthy food on the day before a major holiday. Bloodshed is traumatizing for young children. Don’t take the hungry, tired, crying children you just picked up at day care to the deli counter while you leisurely choose dinner. The people behind you with hungry, tired, crying children are on the verge of violence as it is, and the hungry, tired people between you are on the verge of tears. When the service counter staff says, "I can help whoever's next," you do get special points for having just strolled in the door, but when you try to redeem them by going to the front of the line, the people who have been waiting patiently for a very long time are legally allowed to break your leg. Never say, “I don’t know, I just work here” or any variation thereof. You never know when that line will turn out to be the straw that breaks the camel's back -- and maybe yours. Don’t require your telephone staff to pitch numerous extra products to every single caller before completing their request. Someday someone with knowledge of plastic explosives is going to visit your headquarters and then the only thing anyone will be buying is the farm. Thank you! I feel better already! Return to top of page.
Following the birth of a new grandson, I spent quite a bit of time talking about family. One conversation degenerated into giggles and guffaws as, assisted by a wine cooler, I attempted to explain the relationship of someone who had sent the parents a baby gift. I couldn’t find a word — indeed, English has no word — for the mother-in-law of my son-in-law’s brother.
English has one of the largest vocabularies of all the world languages, and yet it lacks single words to name concepts for which we must instead use whole phrases. Other languages fill in some of these gaps. German has a wonderful word, “Schadenfreude,” which is used to describe that delicious feeling when a rotten person finally gets exactly what he/she deserves. Schadenfreude is, of course, immediately followed by a wave of guilt that one would feel pleasure at another’s misfortune. But some Germans frown at linguistic creativity. While taking advanced language training in Germany I tried to combine “klein” (small) and “Einzelheit” (detail) into “Kleinzelheiten” to mean “those annoying little details.” Our instructor fixed me with a steady stare: “Gibt’s kein.” Translation: there is no such word. German, along with many other languages, uses different words for singular and plural “you,” thereby eliminating an ambiguity that can be very useful in English. Because of gender endings, readers of German know immediately if the teacher, judge, garbage collector or pilot is male or female. Families rate more linguistic attention in other languages than in English. Chinese has specific words for eldest son and mother’s uncle.1 Serbian differentiates my sister's/brother's spouse, my wife's sister's husband, my wife's brother, my wife's sister, or my husband's brother's wife — all of which would have come in handy during the conversation mentioned earlier.2 One of our Greek translators writes, “My godfather & godmother are my parents' godbrother & godsister. My children's spouses are my groom and bride too, and my children's spouses' parents (their in-laws) are my co-in-laws.”3 Vocabulary also grows from the flavor of a culture. In Asian cultures, for example, status and relationship are important, and Vietnamese pronouns are laden with implications. Writes one of our translators, “The choice of pronouns two people use when talking to each other gives the listener a wealth of information about their status, relationship, and intentions in a way that simply cannot be duplicated in English!”4 Portuguese captures the feeling of missing/longing/nostalgia/melancholy with the word “saudade.” Wanderlino Arruda, poet and blogger, writes, “Saudade is a pain that suffocates the heart and gratifies the soul. Saudade is the presence of the absent, the memory of the loved one, a sort of bittersweet, give and take arrangement of convenience with distance, a joyful, pleasant sorrow of the seen-unseen, of love, in the absence of the beloved."5 A Hebrew speaker adds that English has no equivalent for Hebrew's “davka,” which means (approximately) "to spite someone" (but with rich undertones of cultural nose-thumbing). English also lacks Hebrew's "Lama, mi met?" which means, literally, "Why, who died?" but signifies, "I don't think I need to do whatever you've asked, and I would only do it as a favor if someone TRULY important has died."6 As one would expect, Dutch has developed many different waterway words. “Sloot,” “polder,” “kanaal,” “gracht,” “beek,” “rivier” allowing the Dutch to make fine distinctions between their many types of waterways.7 As a native English speaker I wait patiently for someone to coin the missing words I need. If you have created words to fill your particular linguistic requirement, let us know. We will post interesting responses in future columns. Return to top of page. Contributing to this article: 1 Don Rogalski 2 Ivana Vuletic 3 Michael Kambas 4 Rosemary Nguyen 5 Walter Steckelberg-Constante 6 Dena Bugel-Shunra 7 Benno Groeneveld
I admit I’m an impatient person. My computer crashes because I’ve clicked four other places while waiting for the program to react to my first click. I want people to return my phone calls now, and it annoys me when e-mail answers don’t arrive immediately.
Still, I know that a quality product takes time. And I’m willing to wait (while tapping my toes and drumming my fingers) for a special order to be filled. I also understand that screw-ups happen. I don’t like it, but I understand. What I don’t understand is the ever-more-common attitude of customer service representatives who refuse to take responsibility for a faulty product or a billing system error. Twice in the past year the phone company has threatened to cut off our service for non-payment. Each time the notice arrived simultaneously with the new bill thanking us for our prompt payment. The hospital where our daughter was treated for a serious accident is hounding us nearly to the point of harassment about bills – bills which they sent to the wrong insurance company despite our repeated phone calls. Each time, I’m told we should see to it that the correct company gets the bill. How? I ask. More to the point, why? The mistake is yours — fix it. Computer support lines are a category all by themselves. My favorite line there is, “That shouldn’t happen, ma’am.” Well, the reason I called is that it did happen. If you sent us faulty software or hardware, don’t waste my time. Just make it right. Untrained teenage retail clerks also have me gnashing my teeth. Do you have X? Blank stare. I dunno. Second blank stare. I have thus far refrained from flattening one of them. But to be fair, a business owes its employees at least minimal training and a walk through the facility before sticking name tags on their shirts and turning them loose. Complaining is fun, but examples of excellent customer service exist as well. Our network technicians do what we ask them to do, find problems we weren’t aware of, work outside of regular business hours so we don’t lose work time, and always clean up after themselves. The local car care folks call me by name, return a clean vehicle and explain things in an understandable way without patronizing me. And the company from which we bought leather chairs had the perfect response when I called about a puncture in the upholstery: “We’ll send someone out, ma’am. Will Thursday work for you?” When I stammered that we hadn’t bought the extra warranty, the voice on the phone smiled and said, “That’s OK. We want you to be happy so you’ll come back.” And I will. Anyone at Precision Language Services who answers a call from an irate customer automatically responds, “How can we make this right for you?” Sometimes an explanation is all that’s needed. Sometimes there’s been a misunderstanding between the contact person and the end user. Sometimes the person calling has the wrong company and we’ve never seen their translation. But in those rare instances when we’re to blame, we immediately take the problem off the customer’s shoulders and handle it as quickly as possible. It’s our mistake. We’ll fix it. Return to top of page.
or: If life gives you (floppy rubber) lemons...
Preparing to exhibit at a national conference later this spring, we ordered several small advertising giveaways. For years our signature item has been a coffee coaster with our logo and tag line, and people know to come to our booth for the new coaster every year.
Although some of the giveaways weren’t planned for one of the local exhibits, we put a rush on this year’s coasters because we did want the new design for the clients we would see there. As the saying goes, haste makes waste. Due to a holiday and some confusion over the color of the coasters, the order hadn’t arrived the day before the exhibit. In a display of true customer service, our vendor picked up the coasters from the shipper and brought them to the exhibit hall for us as we were setting up our booth. It would be hard to say who was more surprised when we opened the box -- us or the vendor. Instead of the lovely brushed suede embossed coasters we had ordered, we had hundreds of floppy, super-thin jar openers. No wonder the box was so light. I am not a particularly patient person. People were beginning to enter the exhibit hall and I was angrily shoving the box out of sight at the back of our booth when our Marketing Coordinator grabbed a handful of the “coasters” and approached the first people near us. “Can I offer you a failed marketing device?” she chirped with a huge smile. “In fact, we’d like some help trying to figure out just what these actually are!” They laughed and came to the booth where she was rapidly fanning out a display of the item. She continued an easy banter and slipped brochures and business cards into their hands along with the “coaster.” During the rest of the day we collected a list of possible uses. Ranging from knee pads for filing to patches for worn jeans, from frisbees to eye-shades to elbow patches to falsies (!), the suggestions had people laughing around our booth most of the day. Incidentally, while they laughed and came up with ideas, our logo was in front of their eyes much longer than it would have been with the normal coffee coaster. I suppose you could say that instead of coffee, we made lemonade that day. Return to top of page.
Our office is a serious workplace. Patents, discovery documents, contracts, pre-purchase financial instruments all require exact, precise translation and secure, confidential handling. Package inserts, instruction manuals, and help screens must be perfect. Translations are checked and double-checked. Deadlines are met. But every once in a while...
Heavy spring rains and hot, humid summer days produced a bumper crop of mosquitoes, the Minnesota state bird. My husband was given a little yellow badminton racket guaranteed to electrocute the bugs. It was a battery-operated contraption with death in its meshes. We had fun swinging away in the backyard after dark, watching the racket’s grid light up with a little “fzzt” every time a mosquito was fried in the stroke. The racket came to work with me so I could demonstrate for everyone how high-tech our family has become. After the initial exhibition it lay forgotten on the filing cabinet for a few days. And then a horsefly — a very large, loud horsefly — managed to find its way into our office. The day was busy and at first we brushed the fly away absentmindedly, but before long its presence exceeded the nuisance threshold and we began swatting. In and out the doorways it went, pausing on this desk, that light, this shoulder, that keyboard until we declared war. With the precision of the well-oiled team that we are, we trapped the fly in a single room. Weapons were seized and the attack was on, complete with war whoops. Smack! Swat! Swear! Swish! The flyswatter our office manager was using broke, and, seeing the fly finally land, she picked up the first thing handy. The little yellow racket gave its all. Flash! POP! ZZZT! The fly fried on the power strip on which it had landed, and the office went black. Stunned silence gave way to hysterical laughter as we reset the circuit breakers, cleaned off the wall behind the power strip and put the racket away. The next caller may have wondered why the “Good morning. May I help you?” was a little breathless. After all, this is a serious workplace. Return to top of page.
Got your attention with that title, didn’t I?
Last week I heard an executive say (with a great deal of cynicism) that business ethics is an oxymoron. She got the expected laugh, but as I looked around, the expressions that floated across the other faces at the table showed she’d hit a nerve. Everyone followed the recent corporate accounting scandals. It’s not something to be proud of, but a bit of schadenfreude arises when the mighty -- and richer -- fall. We quietly examine our own financials, verify that procedures are being followed, and resolve to tighten hiring practices. But I don’t think that executive was talking about the issues that land you in jail. She was probably referring to the little things that tempt all of us and help smooth a shaky transaction or a failed delivery. Business via the Internet offers a plethora of excuses for late, missed, or partial deliveries. Working across time zones and continents lends truth a flexibility that can become seductive. Without a specific policy, without corporate guidelines, it’s incredibly easy to slide into areas that are grey, then black. Years ago, the presence of my youngest daughter in the office as part-time help brought the issue into focus for me. I remember her watching when someone asked me what we were going to tell the client. She needed to see that my walk at the office matched the talk at home. I said, “We tell the client the truth,” and then made it official company policy that we would make every attempt not to put a foot on the other side of the line that marks honesty. It’s a policy that everyone here knows. If we say that our client didn’t get the file because our e-mail was down, it means our e-mail truly was not working. If we say the server had problems, it did. If we say the file went out even though the client didn't receive it -- it's the truth. It's not easy to say, "We’re late, someone forgot, there was a problem on our end," but in the end, it's better for client relations than lying would be. Good character -- both for individuals and companies -- is easily eroded by a flow of lies and half-truths. If trust between a company and a client is damaged, then trust between management and employees is suspect. And lying with innocent eyes is not something I want our accounting staff to learn. We enjoy an excellent reputation that we’ve worked hard to build. How could we ever repair the damage if we were caught in a lie? In the interests of full disclosure, however, I should note that we have nothing against structuring the truth as we see it. Marketing and advertising courses plus watching politicians spin their versions of an event can be truly educational. We acknowledge that all people paint themselves in the best possible light. But here we stop before we step over the line. Return to top of page. |
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