Consultants need real feedback

Dear Jeremiah, you have a knack for raising all the right questions. I am now retired but during my 28 years as a translation , I saw as a major weakness (at least in AFrica where I worked) in the system of evaluation and ongoing training once a consultant was confirmed as a full consultant. Also the evaluation was always top down. As I had been a university professor previously, I

I think it is a very important topic, indeed. Together with Lynell Zogbo, I am very much in favour of a TC evaluation system. The unwillingness of 'bosses' to implement it is palpable. There many obstacles to a good evaluation of translations consultants. 1. Consultants are evaluated by their superiors, who never see them at work in real life. In many cases, they do not even receive copies of the consultant notes. In a certain region, where TC's are officially required to do so, only very few copy their notes to the translation coordinator. Thus, this 'boss' has no clue what the TC's are doing. 2. I share Lynell Zogbo's viewpoint that feedback must be primarily bottom-up. However, mother-tongue translators often come from cultures where giving (critical) feedback to consultants (usually in a position of authority) is unheard of. Instead, criticisms are channeled to colleagues of other projects or to other consultants, rarely to the superiors of the TC in question. 3. The idea of judging someone else's work and, if necessary, to draw firm conclusions, is foreign to Christian organizations. If consultants are fired, the reasons seldom have to do with someone's consultant work. 4. SIL, e.g., has never set a firm retirement policy, which allows consultants to go on until their eighties. I have recently seen some unfortunate consequences of this weakness. Translations are being checked in an inadequate manner, MTT's are complaining among each other, and the organization is quite unable to deal with it. 5. Taking firm steps to promote evaluation and additional training, actively retiring consultants who are over 75 (or 70) are not going to be popular among the proponents of production (for SIL, e.g., in the framework of Vision 2025). An active retirement policy is going to decrease the pool of consultants available, evaluation and training will slow down the output (on the short term) etc. I think there is a great need of an evaluation system. I'd appreciate adequate feedback by the right persons myself (even if it's critical), and it will do the quality of our translations, and probably also their use, no end good. Short term it will cause hiccups, but long term we all will benefit from it.