Receiving the same correction from the reviewer that you've already received on another job is one of the worse things that can happen. There's nothing more annoying for the reviewer than repeated errors from one job to another on a similar project. This means that you don't pay attention to the recommendations and the reviewer must waste their time correcting your work again.
When I analyze the client's feedback I separate it into three groups:
- We knew about this requirement and still made a mistake.
- We've never seen this requirement before—it's a new direction from the client.
- The client made small stylistic and preferential corrections.
We knew but still made a mistake. The least pleasant of the bunch is when the client had already voiced their requirements about specific term usage or style, but we continue to make mistakes in the translation. In such cases I try to go through the chain of events and figure out what happened. I check what references were sent to the translator, what instructions the linguist received, and if the QA tool was set up properly to check the work. There was obviously a glitch somewhere and it needs to be found and fixed.
I had a funny, but very unpleasant case once. There was a project on which the reviewer corrected our translation and requested that we always write an abbreviation using lower-case letters. We added this condition to our QA tool and the program was supposed to always alert us when the abbreviation was written with any upper-case letters. Several months have passed, and I received an email from the reviewer with nothing more than this abbreviation in the list of other corrections. I spent several hours on trying to figure out what happened, and it turned out that when I added the abbreviation to the QA tool, I used the wrong keyboard language and typed the Russian letter "с" instead of English. So the abbreviation looked correct but the tool was reading it as something completely different.
Something new. Almost every project we work on brings forth some new preferences from the client. This can be terminology preference changes, requirements regarding dates and numbers, usage of articles or capitalization.
These may affect not just one request, but all of the same client's requests, so we have to update the glossary, set up checks in the QA tools, and make necessary corrections in the checklist.
If during the back and forth with the client we find out that something can't be included into automatic checks, we send out a mass email to all linguists involved, letting them know that there are new requirements from the client.
Style corrections by the client. There are times when the client makes minor changes to the style of the translation, rephrasing a sentence here, changing the preposition or article there, or adding a word. These changes don't improve the text or worsen it, so we just accept them and update the TM, so the CAT tool uses the client's preferred translation of any specific phrase in the future.
But if there are too many stylistic changes, it should signal that the reviewer isn't happy with the work of your linguist. If this is the case, you are unlikely to solve the issue with updating glossaries and sending recommendations to the translator—you will probably need to get another translator on the project.
We had a similar situation with our client: a translator-editor pair was chosen to work on the client's projects, but we constantly received many corrections and the reviewer sent us negative comments on a regular basis. Our linguists argued with him, and no compromise was ever reached. We ended up forming new translator-editor pairs and sending the client several test translations, asking them to choose the style they liked. After changing the team, we stopped getting as many corrections and negative feedback—the reviewer was happy to see the translation they liked.