One Person, the Work of Many Hands

On the desk of Han Ji-yeon (41), a project manager at a translation company, the seat where a person used to sit is empty. Not empty in a lonely way — empty in a way that makes you look twice, because the work still turns even with no one there. She glanced at that empty chair and smiled. "There used to be five of us in this row. One to collect the materials, one to organize, one to build the tables, one to review, one to send out. Now — it's just me. And yet more work goes out the door."

To keep from being misunderstood, she nailed it down first. "I didn't cut people. They moved on to better work. What disappeared isn't the people — it's the waiting between one person and the next." That sentence is the whole of this piece. Everything we have seen in the field over six months gathers, in the end, into this one line.

We chose to close the final issue of this magazine at her desk not because she runs an especially large company. If anything, it is because hers is small. In a small place one person knows many columns, but there are no hands to hold those many columns at once. And so the smaller the place, the more the flow is split across more hands. Han Ji-yeon's story is about how those split-off hands came back to one person.

The Flow Five Hands Used to Hold

What Han Ji-yeon does is translate manuals, contracts, and technical documents into multiple languages and deliver them. The company is small. She is the only standing PM; translators are hired externally for each job. When a job came in, the flow used to run like this.

• Collecting materials — gather in one place the source files, glossaries, and past translations the client sent. One person in charge.
• Organizing — break the text into sentence units so translators can work, mark repeated phrases, attach the glossary. One person in charge.
• Building tables — bundle progress into a table by language and by chapter. How far along, who is holding it, when it will be done. One person in charge.
• Reviewing — set the returned translation beside the source and check whether terms are consistent, whether numbers match, whether any paragraphs are missing. One person in charge.
• Sending out — produce the final version in the client's format and ship it with the invoice. One person in charge.

Five columns. And between every column, waiting and copying over crept in. Collecting had to finish before organizing began; organizing had to finish before the table was updated. Every time it passed from one hand to the next, a file was saved one more time, an email went back and forth one more time, "which folder did you put that in?" was asked one more time.

"You know what frustrated me most?" she asked. "I was the only one who knew the whole flow, and yet I never got to hold a single column all the way through. When I receive the materials, I know — 'ah, this client absolutely needs this term written this exact way.' But by the time that knowing reaches the person organizing, it has worn down passing through two hands. Even if I write a note and hand it over, a note isn't a person."

She says she held a thirty-minute meeting every day. A meeting to align the state of the five columns. "That meeting didn't do the work. It was a meeting to fill the gaps between one piece of work and the next. Gaps that, if they weren't there, you wouldn't need it at all."

And it was in that gap that the accident happened. Once, she delivered a manual for a medical-device company, and one terminology rule dropped at the organizing stage went out even after passing review. "In a place where 'Vorsicht' should have been used in German, 'Warnung' went in. The meanings differ subtly, the person organizing didn't know that subtlety, and I, reading twelve hundred lines of review, went bleary-eyed right there." It was not a major accident, but they had to redeliver, and the night she spent writing that email stayed with her a long time. "That's when I understood. As long as my knowing reaches only one column of the flow, the more columns there are, the more accidents there are too."

The Flow Gathers Into One Hand

Now she has made those five columns into her own tool and joined them into one. She never learned to code. "I didn't draw the screens. I told it what comes into each column and what should go out. I know that — I've done this work for eight years. The work of translating that into something a computer understands, makemind took over."

Each column is one small screen. Like the farmer's screen, the teacher's screen, the tax accountant's "Today's Deadlines" from past issues — nothing grand. But once those small screens were joined, the flow changed.

• When a client uploads a file to the collecting materials screen, the source, the glossary, and past translations gather in one place, tagged with which client's which job they came from.
• The gathered material flows straight into the organizing screen, where it is broken into sentence units and repeated phrases are marked. The terminology rules Han Ji-yeon set are attached here automatically. "It used to be that this rule lived only in my head, so I conveyed it by word every time. Now the screen holds it."
• When a job sent to a translator comes back, the table screen updates on its own. How far along each language and chapter is, is right there, without anyone copying it over.
• The review screen sets source and translation side by side and points out, by suspecting first, where terms diverge, where numbers are wrong, where paragraphs are missing. "What used to be me reading 1,200 sentences line by line, I now read only the 40 suspect spots. The tool has filtered the rest once. The final judgment is still mine, though."
• The sending out screen produces a draft of the final version and the invoice in the client's format. She looks it over once and presses, and it goes out.

The waiting between column and column vanished. The moment material comes in, the next column is ready to receive it, and her judgment goes straight to the next column without wearing down at any of them. "What I knew at the start goes the whole way through, unchanged. What used to leak passing through two hands, three hands — now it's one hand, so it doesn't leak."

I asked what becomes of something like that German "Vorsicht / Warnung" now. "I put that client's terminology rule into the organizing screen once. In this company's documents, Vorsicht is always 'Vorsicht.' So the next time a job from the same client comes in, it gets caught automatically at the organizing stage. Once my eight years are translated into words a single time, from then on the screen remembers it. I no longer have to look out for the same thing every time." She said this was the change she liked best. "Rules that used to live only in my head are now embedded in the flow. Even when I'm away from my seat, the flow holds them."

This is the screen she opens every morning. At the top, the jobs due today, each with its D-day; in the middle, which of the five columns each job is in; at the bottom, the collection of spots flagged as suspect in review. Look at that middle row and you can see at a glance where a job is flowing, from collecting materials to sending out. "It used to be I had to ask five people to know this. Now the screen knows."