Articles and Stories

January 14, 2014

A very Happy New Year to everybody.

The New Year started with temperatures dropping to very low levels in the United States. This recent winter freeze closed schools and offices and many employees worked from home.  Water pipes burst, trees fell on power lines and people were left without power for several days. Even Niagara Falls was partially frozen.

Pictures of icy landscapes, frozen lakes, snow piles, shivering people and various pieces of information about our unusually cold weather were broadcast all over the world leading many of our clients and translators to contact us to make sure that we survived the bitter cold spell.

Everyone is impacted by the weather. We dress according to the weather forecast and we plan our activities depending on the weather predictions. We are normally only aware of the weather around us and maybe the weather of friends and family members living away from us. Unless the news media talks about cyclones, typhoons, wild fires or earthquakes threatening to destroy places, we are not aware of their impact elsewhere.

Fluctuating temperatures and severe weather can impact translation projects. New technology in the U.S. makes it relatively easy to be connected at all times, but a reliable connection doesn’t exist in many other countries. Even if you are connected via a mobile device and high speed internet, working in different file formats and sending larger files remains difficult. Often times, due to bad weather, translators have been forced to go to internet cafés to transmit files through the café’s network to ensure on time delivery.

World Translation Center Project Managers strive to be aware of possible delays due to bad weather. Monitoring bad weather information in the countries of our translators, helps us to predict an accurate delivery date and lets us alert our clients of potential delay.