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University of Padova

General Psychology Department

TO COLLABORATE WITHOUT SEEING EACH OTHER:

TELEWORKIN A

TRANSNATIONAL VIRTUAL ORGANIZATION

Tutor Professor: Giuseppe Mantovani Candidate: Paolo Brunello

Student ID: 382194/PS

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T o m y p a r e n t s

( a n d t o t h e i r s )

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................................ 11

CHAPTER 1 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE “OBJECT” TO STUDY........................................ 12

1.1. WHAT IS A “VIRTUAL ORGANIZATION”? ..................................................................................... 12

1.2. WHO ARE THE “SUBCONTRACTORS”? ........................................................................................... 131.3. WHY IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VD AND ITS SUBCONTRACTORS INTERESTING? .................. 15

1.4. THE SPECIFIC RESEARCH CONTEXT: VD AND ITS CULTURE .......................................................... 191.4.1. The workprocess................................................................................................................ 21

1.4.2. Why transnational? ........................................................................................................... 24

1.5. INTERNAL COMMUNICATION AT VD............................................................................................ 251.5.1. Computer mediated communication (CMC)....................................................................... 25

1.5.2. Oral communication at VD................................................................................................ 26

1.6. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VD AND ME .................................................................................. 26

1.7. A POSSIBLE CLASSIFICATION FOR VD ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE .............................................. 27

CHAPTER 2 METHODOLOGY........................................................................................................ 33

2.1. THE ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH.................................................................................................. 33

2.2. “THE UNDERLYING EPISTEMOLOGY” ........................................................................................... 332.3. THE BITS (THE SO-CALLED DATA) ................................................................................................. 35

2.3.1. Information sources and related data ................................................................................ 35

2.3.2. The email exchange between Subcontractors, Project Managers and Clients..................... 35

2.3.3. Collective Events ............................................................................................................... 36

2.3.4. The subjects....................................................................................................................... 36

2.3.5. The websurvey ................................................................................................................... 372.3.5.1. The websurvey construction and its goals ....................................................................................... 37

2.3.5.2. The websurvey specificity................................................................................................................. 38

CHAPTER 3 DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS............................................................................. 41

3.1. WRITTEN DOCUMENTS................................................................................................................ 413.1.1. Fieldnotes.......................................................................................................................... 41

3.1.2. The interviews ................................................................................................................... 42

3.2. THE EMAIL EXCHANGES ANALYSIS.............................................................................................. 42

3.2.1. Structural analysis............................................................................................................. 423.2.1.1. The email management system ........................................................................................................ 42

3.2.2. Operative analysis ............................................................................................................. 443.2.2.1. Email messages coding..................................................................................................................... 44

3.2.2.2. Communication rules identification ................................................................................................. 54

3.2.2.3. Negotiation and meta-negotiation .................................................................................................... 60

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3.2.2.4. Problems notification and suggested solutions................................................................................ 62

3.3. WEBSURVEY ANALYSIS .............................................................................................................. 78

3.3.1. The pilot test, the websurvey submission and the response rate.......................................... 78

3.3.2. How representative the results are?................................................................................... 80

3.3.3. Job Advantages and Disadvantages according to VD Subcontractors................................ 883.3.3.1. The Advantages ................................................................................................................................ 88

3.3.3.2. The disadvantages............................................................................................................................. 91

3.3.4. Bittersweet Isolation.......................................................................................................... 94

3.3.5. The computer and the Internet according to VD Subcontractors ........................................ 97

3.3.6. Time Management ........................................................................................................... 100

3.3.7. Different set of values that VD Project Managers and Subcontractors declare to use to

evaluate their counterpart ......................................................................................................... 103

3.3.8. Computer Mediated Interculturality................................................................................. 111

CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................. 121

3.4. META-ANALYSIS ...................................................................................................................... 1213.5. RELEVANT ASPECTS OF THE VD-SUBCONTRACTORS RELATIONSHIP NOT CONSIDERED IN THIS

STUDY............................................................................................................................................. 123

APPENDIX ........................................................................................................................................ 125

ATTACHMENT 1. EMAIL MESSAGE INVITING TO PARTICIPATE TO THE WEBSURVEY. ............................ 125

ATTACHMENT 2. WEBSURVEY. ......................................................................................................... 127ATTACHMENT 3. MISSING ANSWER(S) PAGE...................................................................................... 140

ATTACHMENT 4. FREQUENCIES AND PERCENTAGES OF ALL THE ANSWERS TO MULTIPLE CHOICE

QUESTIONS AS THEY APPEAR IN THE ORDER THEY WERE ASKED. ....................................................... 141

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Tables Index

Table 1. VD services and their “weight” the yearly budget..................................................................... 21

Table 2. ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURES (adapted from Bellotto, Trentin, 1996) ............................. 30

Table 3. Analyzed project summary ...................................................................................................... 45

Table 4. Example of analysis of an email message. ................................................................................ 46

Table 5. Each color identifies a specific couple of interlocutors and the frequency of their exchanges.... 49

Table 6. Typical job conclusion with a Subcontractor. ........................................................................... 57

Table 7. Example of delivery message for a completed project.............................................................. 58

Table 8. Date and time of the messages exchanged between the Project Manager Florence and Lucio,

Italian Subcontractor. .................................................................................................................. 63

Table 9. Example of technical problem. ................................................................................................. 65

Table 10. Example of different types of problems occurring simultaneously. ......................................... 68

Table 11. Example of technical-administrative problem with relational spin-off and its resolution. ........ 74

Table 12. ITEM: Besides VD, for how many other translation agencies are you currently working?

.................................................................................................................................................... 79

Table 13. ITEM: Where do you connect from (most of the times)? ................................................... 81

Table 14. ITEM: Can you read HTML e-mails (i. e. messages containing formatted text, pictures,

clickable links and such)? .......................................................................................................... 82

Table 15. ITEM: What kind of multimedia devices do you have available on your computer? ....... 82

Table 16. ITEM: Have you ever held a videoconference or talked over the Internet? ...................... 82

Table 17. ITEM: How would you define your computer expertise?.................................................. 83

Table 18. ITEM: How many years have you had access to the Internet? .......................................... 83

Table 19. ITEM: Have you ever met him or her in person? ............................................................... 83

Table 20. ITEM: Email......................................................................................................................... 84

Table 21. ITEM: Phone ........................................................................................................................ 84

Table 22. ITEM: Fax ............................................................................................................................ 84

Table 23. ITEM: eFax and such........................................................................................................... 84

Table 24. ITEM: Person ....................................................................................................................... 85

Table 25. ITEM: Regular mail ............................................................................................................. 85

Table 26. ITEM: How often do you check your working email address? .......................................... 85

Table 27. ITEM: Do you have a personal network of translators you collaborate with (not

necessarily other VD Subcontractors)?......................................................................................... 86

Table 28. ITEM: Email......................................................................................................................... 86

Table 29. ITEM: Phone ........................................................................................................................ 86

Table 30. ITEM: Fax ............................................................................................................................ 87

Table 31. ITEM: eFax and such........................................................................................................... 87

Table 32. ITEM: Person ....................................................................................................................... 87

Table 33. ITEM: Regular mail ............................................................................................................. 87

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Table 34. “Teleworking”(…) for you is more of a:.............................................................................. 90

Table 35. ITEM: Have you ever wished to meet her/him?.................................................................. 92

Table 36. ITEM: Have you ever wanted to know how she/he looks like? .......................................... 92

Table 37. ITEM: Usually, when you “telework” as a translator, are you physically alone? ............. 94

Table 38. ITEM: Do you miss the direct interaction with other people? ........................................... 94

Table 39. Estimated Internet consumption in a week ......................................................................... 98

Table 40. ITEM: To be a translator is: ................................................................................................ 98

Table 41. Self-estimated weekly workload......................................................................................... 101

Table 42. ITEM: Do you work during weekends? ............................................................................ 101

Table 43. ITEM: During which hours do you prefer to work?......................................................... 102

Table 44. ITEM: Are you currently working more or less than your DESIRED workload?.......... 102

Table 45. ITEM: How often do you wish you could talk or quickly ask something to the Project

Manager, but you give up because the communication constraints make the effort not

worthwhile?.............................................................................................................................. 108

Table 46. ITEM. What is/are your nationality/nationalities? ........................................................... 113

Table 47. ITEM: In which country do you currently live? (Please for United States write US) ..... 114

Table 48. ITEM: How many languages do you fluently speak (your mother tongue included)? .... 114

Table 49. ITEM: Are you currently living or have you ever lived in a country different from your

homeland for a period equal or longer than 6 months? ......................................................... 114

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Acknowledgments

I heartily thank Professor Geoffrey C. Bowker (Communication Dept. at University of

California, San Diego), who more than an academic tutor has been a “vice-father” during my

stay in California. He did not limit himself to wisely orientate me along this research project,

but he has been a generous advisor even in the “human” choices that this thesis has imposed to

me, in a way that our relationship became a friendship. Contextually, I thank all the Laboratory

for Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC) members and its director, Professor Mike Cole,

who all together hosted me with sincere courtesy during my stay at UCSD.

I wish to thank the “VD” CEO and her staff, who allowed me to pursue my research

interests within their organization, and all the Subcontractors who made themselves available to

answer my questions.

I thank my Italian tutor professor, Giuseppe Mantovani, who succeeded in re-orienteering

me firmly, whenever I had found myself in trouble having to choose the right writing style for

the scientific genre.

A special thank goes to Anna Spagnolli, who patiently reviewed this study while I was

writing it, suggesting constructive improvements and critiques; to Carlo Barone, who was

incomparable when pointing out the contradictions present in my theoretical stance. To

Francesca Bassignani, with whom I collaborate during the tense months of this thesis; and

finally to Paolo Vidali, who helped me to find my way out of the narrow philosophical paths I

have been walking through.

An especially warm thank is dedicated to William C. Schmidt, associated psychology

professor at Buffalo University, NY, whom I have known and appreciated only through email:

he, quite exceptionally, made himself available and committed himself to solving those

technical problems which a student — unknown to him — on the other side of the ocean had

come across, using the software that the professor had personally developed.

I send an affectionate thank to Caroline, on the other side of the world, who had to stand

the direct competition of this thesis in terms of “time allocation” (winning most of the times, to

be honest ;-).

Finally, the deepest thank is for my family, not only because they made this American

experience possible, but also because they patiently accepted my standing aloof from everyday

life during this last academic effort of mine.

Well, ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !there is also Brunus, my faithful Macintosh PowerBook G3: it deserves to be

mentioned here, since it has been close to me along these long months, closer than anyone else,

“literally”.

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11

Introduction

This research study has been carried out in a translation agency based in San

Diego, California, during an internship that I did in summer 2000.

The specificity of this organization, which I called VD, is that it works with a network

of freelance translators and designers who live all around the world, with whom it

communicates mainly by email and sometimes over the phone.

For this and other reasons that I am going to explain further on, VD can be

considered a Virtual Organization, a new form of organization made possible by the

diffusion and penetration of the Internet worldwide.

More specifically, this research study focuses on the relationship between VD

and its staff on one side, and the number of Subcontractors on the other. I find this

relationship interesting since it presents some special characteristics:

• there is almost no face-to-face communication: people communicate always

through technological artifacts (computer, phone, fax);

• the interlocutors belong to different cultures;

• there are major constraints in time management, due to the time zone

difference – but not only to it.

Moreover, this relationship appears to be relevant from a sociological point of

view, since it represents a particular form of telework which is developing and

spreading more and more, together with the Internet.

Methodologically, this is an ethnographic case study.

I was a participant observer, took fieldnotes, conducted interviews, analyzed VD written

documents, and even had access to the email exchange that occurred between VD and

its Subcontractors. This data have been integrated with the results of an online

questionnaire (websurvey), which I built ad hoc and then submitted to the

Subcontractors pool.

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Chapter 1

The construction of the “object” to study

1.1. What is a “Virtual Organization”?

There is not a precise definition of Virtual Organization that is also widely

accepted. This concept is fairly new in the management literature, since it came along

with the recent diffusion of the Internet amongst companies and professionals.

The first academic attempt to clarify this topic and to find a shared definition for

this concept has been made in a special issue of the Journal of Computer Mediated

Communication, (vol. 3, issue 4, June 1998)1. The editors tried to focus on the different

aspects that were commonly associated to this term and to summarize a set of

distinctive characteristics:

“A virtual organization is a collection of geographically distributed, functionallyand/or culturally diverse entities that are linked by electronic forms of communicationand rely on lateral, dynamic relationships for coordination.” (DeSanctis, Monge, 1998)

Following their analysis, these authors point out how Virtual Organizations are

often described as rich of external links (Coyle e Schnarr, 1995), managed through

teams according to the needs (Grenier, Metes, 1995; Lipnack, Stamps 1997) and

composed of people physically far away from each other (Clancy, 1994; Barner 1996).

The result, in its purest form should be:

“(…) a company without walls” (Galbraith 1995) that acts as a “collaborative networkof people” working together, regardless of location or who “owns” them (Bleeker1994, Grenier and Metes 1995, Hedberg, Dahlgren, Hansson and Olve, 1997).”(Desanctis, Monge, 1998)

Relationships within this sort of organizations tend to be contractual with an

increased flexibility in terms of roles, tasks, responsibilities, in order to allow what

Mowshowitz (1994) has called “combinatorial freedom” so that

”(…) unlike its contemporary predecessors, the virtual corporation will appear less adiscrete enterprise and more an ever-varying cluster of common activities in the midstof a vast fabric of relationships.” (Davidow and Malone, 1992: 7)

1 This has been a joint issue with Organization Science, Vol. 10, n. 6. Nov.-Dec. 1999

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Thereafter, Desanctis and Monge summarize their meta-analysis in the following

figure 1:

Fig. 1. Typical aspects of Virtual Organization (Desanctis, Monge, 1998).

“It is important to note that these attributes can be applied to employee-employerrelationships, to teams, to firms, and to inter-organizational arrangements.”(ibidem)

Nowadays it is hard to find actual organizations fully presenting all these

characteristics, to be considered pure form of Virtual Organizations. Every model needs

to be adapted to the specific case studied, which can present the attributes mentioned

above in different degree, along with more traditional ones.

1.2. Who are the “Subcontractors”?

Subcontractors are professionals who signed a collaboration contract with the

Virtual Organization – in this case, VD – becoming part of it, to some extent. In VD

case, we are dealing with translators, interpreters, editors, proofreaders, formatters,

The component entities of a Virtual Organization are:

1. Geographically distributed

2. Electronically linked

3. Functionally or culturally diverse

4. Laterally (versus hierarchically) connected

A. Highly dynamic processes

B. Contractual relationships

C. Edgeless, permeable boundaries

D. Reconfigurable structures

MAKING THE FOLLOWING

ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGNS POSSIBLE:

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webmasters, working for VD to perform the range of services this company offers to the

market.

To classify this particular type of teleworkers, I decided to adopt the categories

that had been used in the most important European project on telework, the ECaTT

project (Electronic Commerce and Telework Trends in Europe, http://www.ecatt.com).

During 1999 and 2000, the European Commission financed a large scale research

project in the 10 major European countries (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany,

Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom) involving nearly 12000

among teleworkers (7700) and companies practicing telework (4158).

As the ECaTT project coordinators say:

“We fully agree with Qvortrup (1998, p. 21) that counting teleworkers is “likemeasuring a rubber band” — it is not impossible but the results depend on how far youstretch your definition, with infinite alternative ways to choose from.”(Korte and Gareis, in eWork 2000, p. 26).

From the information I could gather at VD, the teleworkers I surveyed belonged

to the so-called SOHO category:

“Telework by self-employed in SOHOs (Small Offices, Home Offices)Teleworker category IVSelf-employed teleworkers in SOHOs are those:• who are self-employed or effectively self-employed (e.g. persons employed by own

company or employed by organization they have considerable managing powerover);

• whose main place of work is at home or who claim not to have a main place ofwork;

• who use advanced ICT for communicating with clients and/or (other) businesspartners.” (ibidem)

Moreover:

“Individuals who are teleworking from home more than 90% of their overall workingtime are referred to as permanent teleworkers, while those working from home less than90% of their overall working time, but more than one full day per week, are referred toas alternating teleworkers.”(ibidem)

VD Subcontractors are predominantly permanent teleworkers, since the vast

majority of them works from home.

The “Independent Contractor Agreement” they signed in order to work for VD,

clearly specifies the collaboration terms adopted:

“3.1. The contractor is an independent contractor and not an employee, an agent, ajoint venturer or partner of VD.3.2. The contractor will determine the methods, the details, the means and the place to

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perform the services.”

To what extent this autonomy is just formal or real will be discussed further on.

Out of 5,5 million European teleworkers in 1999 (4.1% of the total workforce)

1,25 millions belong to this category (0.9% of the total European workforce — source:

ECaTT, 2000)2.

In the US the research project used considered to be the correspondent of

ECaTT is the Telework America (TWA) 2000. Unfortunately, the categories used to

conduct this research are not overlapping the European ones, so that comparisons are

difficult and it is even hard to estimate the number of American Teleworkers similar to

VD Subcontractors, since the distinctions are fuzzier. What is widely confirmed by the

data collected by the most important American institution on this field, the International

Telework Association & Council (http://www.telecommute.org) is that telework as a

social phenomenon is increasing. The same can be said for this particular kind of

telework that, more than other forms, takes advantages from the penetration of the

Internet, as I will show.

1.3. Why is the relationship between VD and its Subcontractors interesting?

Perhaps the most specific aspect of this relationship is the absolute absence of

face-to-face interaction. In the technological and management literature about virtual

teams — remote groups collaborating through email, phone and videoconferences — it

is often remarked how important regular face-to-face meetings are in order to create and

maintain a fruitful relationship. (Lipnack, Stamps, 1997; Warkentin, Sayeed,

Hightower, 1997).

Consequently, I reserved special attention to the role of technological artifacts in

constructing the “shared symbolic platform” (Mantovani, 1996) upon which

“interactants” can play their everyday interactions even if not physically present at the

same time and place.

In such relationships, language is a key element. From a theoretical point of

view, I root into Wittgenstein’s conception of language as a life form, where words – as

2 In Italy in 1999 there was 584.000 teleworkers (2.9% of the total workforce) of which 90.000 (0.5%)

belonging to this category.

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symbols – are considered tools; with them people do not simply describe things, but

actually do things, and they do those things following some rules of the game.

43. (…) The meaning of a word is its use in language. (Wittgenstein, 1953)

Therefore, the meaning is contingent, but it is not “whatever”: it pre-exists in

the network of possibilities offered by that specific linguistic game that is being played.

In his “Philosophical Researches” (1953), Wittgenstein focuses on context as

indispensable component of the meaning. The meaning is no longer and necessarily the

logical one — as he had affirmed in his Tractatus (Wittgenstein, 1921) — but it is also a

pragmatic one, in that it concerns the communicator’s intentions and cannot leave them

out. Outside that specific context and linguistic game that is shared with the

interlocutor, what is said becomes meaningless, unintelligible.

Grice (Grice, 1975) refined this concept formulating his cooperation principle3,

but more importantly, he enounced the two fundamental conditions that allow to

indicate and confirm – namely to negotiate – the meaning in the context of a

conversation:

• the meaning I give to your action consists in what I believe to be your

intention while doing it;

• the meaning you give to your own action is not only what you intend

with it, but depends also from the intention that you think I may

attribute to it.

This two principles are the basis for Harré’s theory of the meaning (Harré,

1994), but I would say that even G. H. Mead’s symbolic interactionism (Mead, 1934)

Bateson’s cybernetics (Bateson, 1972), Goffman’s dramaturgic metaphor, Garfinkel’s

ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1984), Bruner’s cultural psychology (1990) and finally

the relationship between audience and literary genre in Rorty (Rorty, 1994), in different

ways appear to “drink at this source” — so to speak.

This interaction, which Harré called the synchronization of beliefs, is an

indispensable pre-condition in order to build a common background, that shared

platform, which is necessary for any communication. From a logical point of view,

communication as transmission of meaning is pure illusion, since the words’ meanings

3 It is a sort of communicator’s moral imperative:

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are inevitably personal, being the result of a specific individual unique history.

Therefore, there will never be a perfect coincidence between the meanings that two

persons attribute to the same signifier. In Maturana’s and Varela’s words (1980):

“As long as language is considered to be denotative, it will be necessary to consider itas a mean to transmit information, as if something would be transmitted from anorganism to another in such a way that the recipient’s uncertainty domain should bereduced according to the sender’s. Nevertheless, when it is recognized that language isconnotative and not denotative, and that its function is to orientate the oriented [therecipient] within his cognitive domain independently from the orientator’s [the sender]cognitive domain, it becomes evident that there is no information transmission throughlanguage. (…) If it seems acceptable to talk about information transmission in everydaytalks, this happens because who talks implicitly assumes that the listener is identical tohimself and therefore will have the same cognitive domain as his (as it could never be),and he is amazed when a misunderstanding occurs.”

Consequently, understanding each other is the result of a very fragile

homeostatic balance, where each word, each sign, is potentially disruptive, and

therefore it needs a continuos effort toward stabilization. To go from the

synchronization to the syntonization of beliefs (Harré, 1994) takes many years of

repeated interactions, as we can see in successful marriages, harmonious jam sessions,

winning teams who manage to “think together”. In order to “accelerate things”, we

contrived scripts (Shank, Abelson, 1977), action repertoires (Harré, 1994), narrative

genres (Rorty, 1994), roles, routines (Goffman, 1959), linguistic games (Wittgenstein,

1953), etc. These “tricks” being shared, we don’t have to re-negotiate everything each

time from scratch.

This research project approach aims to point out the collaboration relationship

distinctive characters within a constructionist meta-theoretical framework. The focus is

on those negotiation and meaning aspects leading to a shared reality model that manifest

itself through the enacted work practices.

The kind of negotiation occurring in VD — and in similar Virtual Organizations

— presents some specific characteristics. First of all, there are no paralinguistic and

nonverbal cues, as we have in common face-to-face interaction; normally, these cues

would allow the two interlocutors to realize when a discrepancy between their goals and

"Make your contribution to the conversation such as it is required, in that specific moment, by thegoal or direction accepted for the linguistic exchange you are involved in.” (Grice, 1967).

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the ongoing interaction occurs. People may replace them with some other signs, like

emoticons or smileys, in order to enrich communication. But this might not work, since

the two interlocutors need to share a common set of emoticons first, that often has to be

negotiated as well.

Moreover, we had to consider the complex matter of asynchronous CMC and

synchronous CMC, which intertwines the important distinction between accessibility

and availability. For example, phone communication is synchronous, since both

interlocutors have to be present simultaneously, whereas voicemail is asynchronous

since the interlocutors do not have to be present at teh same time (Dix and coll., 1993).

Accessibility refers to the possibility to reach the interlocutor, not taking into

consideration his/her availability to start an interaction (Preston, 1998). For example,

email is an asynchronous CMC that makes the interlocutor accessible, but not

necessarily available to answer immediately. This is particularly the case when the

correspondence between VD and its Subcontractor reaches across very different time

zones: the larger the difference, the thinner the overlapping time span between one’s

office hours and the other’s.

Another question is that of interculturality: in their article in the JCMC issue

mentioned above, Jarvenpaa e Leidner (1998) say:

“While there is a wealth of research on computer-mediated communication andresearch on cross-cultural communication, there is a paucity of research on cross-cultural computer-mediated communication.”

In this study I attempted to investigate this aspect, trying to understand how

cultural background and some CMC types influence each other.

Translators, who are the vast majority of VD Subcontractors, have very

interesting characteristics from a cross-cultural point of view:

• they necessarily know a foreign language very well;

• often they are – or have been – immigrants;

• they have to interact with VD personnel, which is itself multicultural (Fig. 2).

It was then plausible that these people could represent a population especially

sensitive and capable to “catch” those communicational breakdowns that are related to a

non-shared cultural background. On the other hand though, the opposite hypothesis

could also be possible, namely that since they had to live through many culture shocks,

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these people could have developed some sort of automatic strategies to adapt, so that

these culture shocks were not experienced as shocks any more.

1.4. The specific research context: VD and its culture

VD Inc.4 it is a company based in the San Diego area, in California, that offers

“Globalization Solutions”, in other words, its mission is to:

“The primary mission of VD is to ensure our customers’ success in the global

market by facilitating timely, accurate and successful communications, regardless of

language or medium.”

From an economic point of view, the San Diego area is well developed,

especially in the telecommunication industry with large companies like Qualcomm, that

is one of the major VD customers.

In 1999 VD had one million dollars turnover. At the time of my internship 9

people were working in its office nearby San Diego. 6 of them are Russian, including

the company founder and owner. She has been living in the US for 18 years and

founded the company in 1995. VD major competitive advantage (Porter, 1985) is its

highly qualified technological expertise, both in specialized translations and in different

file format handling (CAD, websites, CD-ROM, software localization). The company

enrolled 6 new persons in the last year: four are Russians, one is British, and one

Brazilian. The formal organization chart is represented below (fig. 2):

4 VD is an alias.

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Fig. 2. VD Organization Chart (updated June 2000)

GalinaBusiness Development Manager & Project Manager

(Russian)Dec. 1999

FlorenceProject Manager & Office Manager

(British)Jan. 2000

HilkeProject Manager

(American-German)Summer 1998 - (currently Part-time)

VivianProject Manager

(Brazilian)Nov. 1999

MeIntern/Researcher

(Italian)21st June - 1st Sept. 2000

Subcontractors(International)

Translators, Editors, Proofreaders,Designers, Interpreters

SergejiComputer Engineer

(Russian)Apr. 2000

Teleworking Software Developers(Webdesigners, Programmers, ecc.)

(Russian)

EvaAssistant & Coordinator

(Russian; Igor's wife)Summer 1999 (Part-time)

IgorSystem Administrator

(Russian)1997

IrinaAccountant

(Russian)Apr. 2000

NatashaGeneral Manager (Founder and Principal)

(Russian)1995

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From this chart it is immediately evident how multicultural VD is and how little

experience in their job the Project Managers had.

1.4.1. The workprocess

The range of services offered by VD and their importance for the company

budget are listed below (Table 1):

Table 1. VD services and their “weight” the yearly budget.

Type of service Approx.

% of the budget

1. Translation (e localization) 70

2. Interpretation 15

3. Dubbing 5

4. Multimedia production 3

5. Publications 3

6. Other (webdesign, software development, e-commerce application) 4

TOTAL 100

The typical workprocess, from the Client’s call to the final product-service

delivery is represented below (fig. 3):

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Fig. 3. Flowchart of the typical workprocess flowchart at VD.

And/or Layoutdesigner

Client (C) contacts VD

Office Manager (OM)receives requestVD estimate

accepted

Client sends document to betranslated via email or ftp

Office Manager (OM)records new project in VD

database

assigns it to P r o j e c tManager responsible forlanguage pair involved inthe project

Project Manager (PM)Starts searching for

Subcontractors best matchingproject requirements

Choice depends onSubcontractors’availability andknown quality

TranslatorPerforms first

translation

EditorEdits (even heavily)

first translation

Proofreader

10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

11

12

Office Manager,together with

accountant, sendsinvoice to Clientand payments toSubcontractors

end

Client receives translateddocument

13

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1. Let’s imagine there is a Client who needs to translate a document into a

different language and chooses to contact VD for this job.

2. The Client will discuss with VD Office Manager the details of the service s/he

expects (dates and price) and Florence, the Office Manager, will send him/her an

estimate.

3-5. If they reach an agreement, the Client will send the file via email or ftp to

Florence, or directly to the competent Project Manager, in case they already worked

together before.

6-7. The Project Manager is responsible for a specific set of languages and has

contacts with a correspondent group of translators, with different subject specialization.

She will select the translator that she considers to be the most adequate to perform that

particular translation and try to contact him/her. In case the selected translator is not

available, the Project Manager will search for another one until she finds a substitute.

Once the translator has accepted the job, the Project Manager will send her/him the

document and the translator will send it back translated.

8-9. But at this point, the document is not sufficiently refined to be delivered to

the Client: so the Project Manager sends it to an editor, who will send it back corrected

to the Project Manager. Generally speaking, the translator has a more specific subject-

related expertise, whereas the editor’s one is more style-related.

10-11. The Project Manager can then choose to send the document to a third

person, the proofreader, whose role is to make sure that the document is “perfect” for

both content and layout. After this third passage the Project Manager will deliver the

translated document to the Client.

12-13. Once the file is delivered, hopefully within the scheduled date, the Office

Manager files the completed job in VD database and proceeds with the accountant to

send an invoice to the Client and to pay the Subcontractors.

This phase is rather delicate from a relational point of view, in that often the

Clients pay later than promised and consequently the Subcontractors have to wait long

before they get their money. It is then up to the Project Manager and to the Office

Manager to mediate and gently solicit the Client while reassuring the Subcontractors on

the other side.

24

I think Florence has given the best description of the relationships among the

three Subcontractors’ roles –Translator, Editor and Proofreader – when I interviewed

her:

“ME: Can you expand a little bit on editing?FLORENCE: (Project Manager/Office Manager) Translators and editors are reversiblerole it’s just the translators get all the information together and… it’s not a first draftthat he does, it’s more than that, but it’s a load of info very quickly writing down andthe editor will then come with a fresh pair of eyes they can make it more fluid, they cancatch mistakes, for example, a marketing editor makes it for mass readership. And thenthe proofreader simply checks for typing mistakes, or minor things, just the last things,but editors they can change, they can cast a lot of words, lose a lot of words, it’s such asubjective thing anyway you know, but they both have the same qualification, it’s justthat some translators don’t like editing because they say it’s a lot of work but it’s muchless highly paid, so they don’t want.ME: So, how much do they get?FLORENCE: 3-4 cents/word, it depends, it varies on the translation quality, if it’s abad translation, it’s a tricky job to do, if someone sends a machine translated[document], editing is basically retranslating.ME: But the editor and the translator are completely independent and they are chosenby you, right?FLORENCE: Yes, they don’t work together, but they know their work will be edited andthey’ll even be pleased about that.ME: Does it ever happen that the translator sends you back the translation and asksyou to take a look at the edited version?FLORENCE: Yes, that often happen, we will often send them a final version just to takea look at it, I know Vivian does that often with her teams, especially ‘cause she does alot of journalistic translation and the client is very very picky and so she does give themthe final version, so that for the next time they can adapt the style.”

1.4.2. Why transnational?

In management literature, it is possible to find a pretty precise definition of

“neighbor terms” like global, multinational, international and transnational (Bartlett,

Goshal, 1987, cit. in Boudreau, Loch, Straud, 1998: 121).

“The global strategy is used when an enterprise locates its headquarters in one countrywhile its operations are performed in one or more other countries. [I.e. those in whichthe labor is cheaper — R. N]. Under this approach, an organization operates in acentralized manner. Efficiency, obtained through economies of scale, is the keycriterion of effectiveness sought by the global company.(…) In a multinational strategy, national or regional operations are relativelyautonomous and decentralized in order to increase sensitivity to differences among theindividual countries in which it operates. The key competitive issue is responsiveness tolocal markets.(…) Under an international strategy, enterprises compete on a worldwide basis, againstother international companies. The international approach calls for a more horizontalstructure and establishes strategic linkages between countries in which a firm operates.Because the key to success in this approach lies in an enterprise’s ability to transferknowledge to overseas units, learning constitutes the key issue.According to Bartlett and Ghoshal, organizations will be most competitive if they

25

simultaneously meet the challenges of global efficiency, local responsiveness, andlearning. Meeting these challenges requires firms to adopt a transnational strategy inwhich each organizational activity is performed in a location where it can be bestaccomplished.”

Even if this classification was meant to categorize companies much larger than

VD, this company entails all the elements to belong to the last category. Indeed, with

the only exception of the scale economies criterion, this organization manages to take

advantage from the US Dollar strength over the other currencies: it can pay wages

considered high by Subcontractors living in countries where the currency is weaker and

it can nonetheless offer very competitive prices for the US market.

Secondly, it is very much a VD concern to localize their services within the

different cultural context of use: i.e. a translator living in his/her country can keep up to

date with the evolution of the national language providing a better service.

Finally, VD holds in very high consideration the necessity of continuous

learning among its Subcontractors, in order to ever better customize the services for

their habitual clients. Consequently, the workprocess at VD – at least ideally –

corresponds to Bartlett and Goshal definition of transnational strategy, since it

distributes the workload to those people who can perform it at best, being in the most

favorable context.

1.5. Internal communication at VD

At VD, people in the office communicate with each other in different ways,

using different channels – both computer mediated and oral.

1.5.1. Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)

VD has set a fairly sophisticated system for email management: there is a private

IMAP mailserver, that holds all the incoming and outgoing messages and is accessible

to everyone in the office from any PC, since these are interconnected in a LAN. This

system is often used for internal communication, especially when different Project

Managers have to work on the same project as it is the case when the requested service

is a multilingual translation. In such cases, the communication is not purely internal,

since it quotes messages related to the ongoing project, sent by the client or by the

Subcontractors. There is no mailing list or listserver to send messages to all the office

members, nor instant messaging software are adopted (MS Outlook, ICQ, AIM, etc.)

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1.5.2. Oral communication at VD

At VD there are no regular meetings: meetings are generally rare. Instead, there

is a fairly frequent oral communication, through the interphone and face-to-face, both

synchronous. People do not have personal voicemail, therefore every incoming call has

to be redirected by Florence, the Office Manager. When the called person is out of

office, she leaves a message on a shared bulletin board.

The flow of people from one room to the colleagues’ one to talk is very

common: the doors are almost always open on every room.

Questioned about meetings, this is what the principal answered:

NATASHA: No meetings at all. Everybody knows what they’re doing and the job getsdone, somehow...ME: But if it’s a question of planning something new do you have… maybe not regularmeetings but… do you meet to find out more ideas, for example?NATASHA: No, no we have... basically Galina and I generate all the ideas and, verycasually letting everybody else know about them, we do all the strategic planning (…)we just pop in each other’s offices.

The adverb “casually” well represents the principal’s spirit or attitude in

managing her business: very informal, with few rules actually codified and written

down and a lot of confidence in the colleagues’ capacity to organize their job and keep

self-motivated even if not directly involved in strategy planning. This turned out to be a

bit too optimistic, at least in the case of Hilke, who decided to quit her job while I was

there, mentioning this as one of the reasons.

1.6. The relationship between VD and me

Natasha wanted me as an intern to organize a short intercultural sensitization

seminar to be presented to their clients as a promotional tool: the goal was to show how

VD could go “the extra mile”, compared to its competitors, offering not only translation

services, but a wider range of “globalization solutions”.

The negotiation between VD and me brought to the following agreement:

I commit to:

A. design a short seminar on intercultural sensitivity;

B. analyze VD work practices from an ergonomic point of view.

27

Moreover, for my academic interest, I will be allowed to investigate the

relationship between the CMC and the cultural background of the people involved in the

communication (Project Manager, Subcontractors, Clients).

Finally, I commit not to disclose any name, contact, or other private information,

without previous VD permission.

VD commits to:

• legitimate my role to the personnel as intern-researcher;

• allow me to ask the personnel for an interview;

• allow me to use the firm database to survey the Subcontractors;

• allow me to access the company email correspondence

• pay me a small reward for each project (A and B) that I will accomplish.

To better understand VD culture and its informality, it might be worth saying

that my request to sign a collaboration contract was perceived as a sort of “lack of trust”

in the principal promise, since, she said, no one in the office had signed anything more

than an informal letter of agreement.

With this role and constraints, in this specific relational context, I pursued my

research goals. That is to say, I was not a pure researcher, nor was I perceived as such

by the rest of the office. I was rather considered a “nosy intern”, so to speak, who, while

tinkering with his laptop, was observing – if not spying – everyone, in order to point out

what was wrong in the company. Moreover, as a consequence, I couldn’t be a full time

researcher, but I had to split my time according to the double role I had.

1.7. A possible classification for VD organizational culture

According to Piccardo and Benozzo (1996: 4), I agree that culture is:

“(…) representable in terms of a continuos flow of experience, a river that proceedsincorporates in its water conceptions of rationality and values. These are founded onthe strategies that, more or less deliberately, emerge from the actors, strategies that aresimultaneously instrumental and expressive.”

Therefore, every effort to “freeze” the river in order to attempt a description of it

— that as such, is static — is inevitably naïve and rough. Nevertheless, I think it is

legitimate and maybe useful to try to throw some “conceptual nets” in this river, being

28

aware that the fish that we will catch will be only that that is compatible with the

specific meshes of those nets.

The conceptual net I chose is the classification of culture proposed by Bellotto e

Trentin (1996: 63-74). These authors suggest a categorization of organizational culture

along two perpendicular axis: the equality-difference axis and the isolation-

participation axis (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Typologies of organizational cultures. (adapted from Bellotto, Trentin, 1996)

These two axis define four quadrants, representing four typologies of

organizational cultures. In short, when there is a strong acknowledgement of the roles’

and status differences, but with little socialization among workers, we are in a

normative-bureaucratic type of culture. If instead, beside the respect of individual

specificity we have an intense participation and socialization, we talk about a

technocratic-paternal culture. In case the emphasis is on the sense of belonging, on the

group, together with the participation among people, roles and functions, we call it a

familistic-maternal type of culture. Finally, it is considered to be an individualistic-

indulgent kind of culture, the one in which a “laissez faire” logic prevails, and the

accent is on everybody’s rights and intentions, where everyone works pretty

independently and the relationship is of “non-interference”.

In the following pages (Table 2) the different characteristics and manifestations

of these four types of culture are roughly represented. The function and usefulness of

DIFFERENCES

EQUALITY

ISOLATION PARTICIPATION

TECHNOCRATIC-PATERNAL

FAMILISTIC-MATERNAL

INDIVIDUALISTIC-INDULGENT

NORMATIVE-BUREAUCRATIC

29

such a categorization is heuristic, that is to say, to provide us with a sort of “compass”

to orientate oneself in the complex world of organizational culture, helping to generate a

meaningful set of questions to investigate the specific culture we are trying to

understand.

Table 2. ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURES (adapted from Bellotto, Trentin, 1996) – in gray VD

CULTURESÆCHARACTERISTICS

Ø

NORMATIVE-BUREAUCRATIC

TECHNOCRATIC-PATERNAL FAMILISTIC-MATERNAL INDIVIDUALISTIC-

INDULGENT

VALUESPRIMARY VALUE, ON

WHICH SELF-ESTEEM AND

PRESTIGE

STATUSFORMALITY RESPECT

SENSE OF DUTY

VALORIZATION OFDIFFERENCESCOMPETENCE

EQUALITY APPRECIATIONAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

EXPERIENCE

EQUALITYLAISSEZ FAIRE, SCARCECONTROL OVER GOALS,

CONSTRAINTS, AUTONOMY.INDEPENDENCE

LEADERSHIP’SFUNCTIONS

STABILITYORDER

CONTINUITYSURENESS

EFFICACY AND EFFICIENCYNEED FOR ACHIEVEMENT

UNITY AND SOLIDARITYNEED FOR AFFILIATION

THEY ARE EXPLICITLYDENIED, BUT PROTECT THEORGANIZATION SURVIVAL

LEADERSHIP STYLE AUTHORITARIAN CONTINGENT PARTICIPATIVE

IT IS OK ONLY WHEN ITDENIES ITSELF: THERE ARE

NO BOSS, ONLYCOLLABORATORS

CAREER

THROUGHQUALIFICATIONS AND

RIGHTS(I.E.: YEARS OF SERVICE)

THROUGH SELECTIONACCORDING TO RESULTS

ACCORDING TO FIDELITYTO THE BOSS AND TO THE

FIRM PHILOSOPHY

THROUGH SPONTANEOUSAND AUTOMATIC

MECHANISMS

MERIT AND FAULTARE JUDGEDCONSIDERING

DIS/ALIGNMENT TO THENORM RESULTS COMMITMENT INFORMAL ASSESSMENT OF

PEOPLE ALTOGETHER

REWARDS’ EQUITY ACCORDING TO STATUS

INCENTIVES AND“PUNISHMENTS” E

ACCORDING TO TECHNICALAND MANAGEMENT SKILLS

EQUALITARISM,DIFFERENTIATION ONLY In

CASE OF SOMEONE’SPARTICULAR NEEDS

DOES NOT TAKE INTOCONSIDERATION

DIFFERENTIATION SINCEEVERYONE’S PERFORMANCEDEPENDS ON EVERYONE’S

POTENTIAL

30

INCENTIVESCALL FOR LOYALTY,

FORMAL CORRECTNESS,RATIONALITY

CALL FOR PERFORMANCEIMPROVEMENT

CALL FOR SOLIDARITY ANDUNITY

CALL FOR EVERYBODY’SAVAILABILITY TO HELP

RELATIONSHIPSAMONG ROLES:

DIFFERENTIATIONROLES AND FUNCTIONS

ARE VERYDIFFERENTIATED

INTEGRATION-DIFFERENTIATION AMONGVERY SPECIALIZED ROLES

FORMALLY VERYNUMEROUS, BUT BLURRED:

THE INTERPERSONALRELATIONSHIPS NETWORK

PREVAILS

SUM OF PARTS, NOT ANORGANISM,

THE INTERPERSONALRELATIONSHIPS NETWORK

PREVAILSTYPE OF

“*-DEPENDENCE” SCARCE INTEGRATION INTERDEPENDENCE DEPENDENCE INDEPENDENCE

CONFLICTPERCEPTION

NEGATIVE: DEVIATIONFROM THE NORM, MUST

BE AVOIDED

CONFLICT ANDCOMPETITION ARE

PERCEIVED AS NORMAL

IT IS BETTER TO AVOID ITAS LONG AS IT IS POSSIBLE

CONFLICT DENIED,RESOLVED PRIVATELY,

INFORMALLY

PSYCHOLOGICALCONTRACTINDIVIDUAL/

ORGANIZATION

COMPLIANCEfl

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

RESULTSfl

REWARD

BELONGING/FIDELITYfl

PROTECTION

ORGANIZATION VIEWED ASPOTENTIALLY LIMITINGPERSONAL FREEDOMfi

RECIPROCAL NON-INTERFERENCE

PUBLIC/PRIVATEDIMENSION

CLEAR SEPARATION:SUBJECTIVITY ALLOWEDONLY AT HOME, NOT AT

WORK

FUSION BETWEENPROFESSIONAL ANDPERSONAL IDENTITY

PERSONAL ANDPROFESSIONAL IDENTITY

ARE BLURRED

PERSONAL IDENTITYPREVAILS OVER

PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY

ORGANIZATIONATMOSPHERE

LOW SOCIALIZATION,FORMALITY, AFFECTIVE

COLDNESS

HIGH SOCIALIZATION,STRESS

HIGH SOCIALIZATIONSOLIDARITY AND UNITY

FEELINGS

LOW SOCIALIZATIONINDIFFERENCE, DIFFIDENCE

31

32

Attempting to apply these patterns to VD organizational culture, we should pose it into

the technocratic-paternal quadrant, even if some attitudes are better represented by the

individualistic-indulgent and even by the familistic-maternal categories (as shown by

the gray background cells in Table 2):

• certainly differences are taken into account, according to the specific competencies

of each staff member, even though a lot of autonomy is given to individuals – the

typical laissez faire attitude;

• the leadership style is contingent, always dealing with emergencies and urgencies,

without a clearly stated and shared long-term planning;

• the members selection and their career depends on their results and not on their

formal titles or degrees;

• the wage is not the same for everyone, and it is declared to be set on a minimum per

month that is then increased with bonus when the productivity is particularly high;

• there is a incentive to the continuous performance improvement and therefore the

psychological contract with the organization is not based on commitment, but on

results;

• there is a considerable interdependence of roles, which integrate and support each

other, holding firm that Natasha is the leader. More than roles though, in such a

small organization the interpersonal relationships are most important.

• With regards to the interpersonal conflict management, VD attitude is closer to the

individualistic-indulgent type: instead of being perceived as “physiological”,

conflicts are denied in public and resolved privately – if at all.

• Another characteristic typically attributed to the technocratic-paternal culture is the

fusion between personal and professional identities. Signs of this attitude are the

extended office time in hectic days and sometimes the work during the weekend, or

the availability to be contacted at someone’s private email during vacations.

Anyway, this attitude was not so emphasized to erase a distinction between

professional and personal identity, with the obvious exception of the entrepreneur,

Natasha.

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Chapter 2

Methodology

2.1. The ethnographic approach

I would call the methodology used in this study ethnographic approach. I call it

approach and not perspective nor method for specific reasons: the term perspective

recalls a sort of abstraction, a zooming out to enlarge our view over the context to be

studied, in a way that Putnam would call “God’s eye” (Putnam, 1981). On the contrary,

I am persuaded that what an ethnographer can do, being immerged into the context of

study, is “to stretch on tiptoes” – so to speak — and try to see from there whether some

patterns can be identified and described. S/he could be considered a high-self

monitoring (Snyder, 1987) person, a symbiont in which an observant self and an actant

self have to split a finite attention, concentration, time.

On the other hand I wouldn’t use the term method since the methodological

guidelines we can find in ethnography literature (Lofland & Lofland, 1995; Piccardo,

Benozzo, 1996) are rarely as rigid and clearcutting as the nomothetic and statistics

methods usually are. I would dare saying that ethongraphy is to statistics as tailoring is

to textile industry. In other words, an ethnographer, like a tailor, is a crafts(wo)man who

owns a specific know-how and adapts it to the phenomenon s/he is studying attempting

to manufacture a story that, like a made to measure suit, will fit the phenomenon in a

convincing way. To reach this goal, it is often necessary to invent ad hoc techniques

progressively emerging from the analysis of the various bits collected: fieldnotes,

interviews, talks and above all, experience.

“[the ethnographer’s] research is nurtured by that intellectuial tension thatPolany(1958) called “the passionate participation in the act of knowing”, not aiming toget to an absolute plausibility of the interpretation, but to make evident the plausibilityof multiple interpretation, being able to found her/his choices.” (Piccardo, Benozzo,1996)

2.2. The underlying epistemology

contestino“According to Neisser, images are not schemes nor mental representations, but projects

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to obtain information about the potential environment. If perceptions are possiblestarting from categorizations, the mind extracts from reality, as it is sociallyconstructed, the linguistic means apt to make it accessible and shared. The everydaylanguage, like the other forms of specialized language, are tools that, while giving tothe world its reality, are structuring the mind according to those relations of which thelanguage is the reflection.” (Salvini, 1988: 13)

I chose this rather complicate paragraph because it synthetically conceives and

tries to describe the relationships between to be, to know and to communicate, or

ontology, epistemology, and language. If I had to depict this three concepts, I would

represent them as three clouds of the same gas (fig. 5), that are blurred with one another,

and cannot subsist independently, but, like the clouds, acquire a shape only when we

want to give it to them.

Fig. 5. A possible graphical representation of constructionism.

If we accept this view, the focus of the research is not telework, nor virtual

organization as “objects”, but the invisible network of interactive relationships

connecting non-human actants (symbolic and material artifacts) and human actants

(people) in its process (Latour, 1991).

“The objects and events made by human beings are not entities, the ‘reality’ of which isindependent from rules of use, meanings and other artifacts: they are rather driftingplatforms, born form the idea of island that they are not.” (Salvini, 1988)

Only recently, computer science, psychology, epistemology, sociology of science,

ethnography got closer and closer under the names of Human-Computer Interaction

(HCI) and Cognitive Ergonomics (Mantovani, 1995), Computer Supported Cooperative

35

Work (CSCW), Situated Action (Suchman, 1987), Situated Learning and Community of

Practices (Lave, Wenger, 1991), Actor-Network Theory (Callon, 1986, Latour, 1991),

Distributed Cognition (Hutchins, 1995) to the very recent studies on Infrastructure

(Star, Ruhleder, 1996; Bowker, Star, 1999). What these different research fields have in

common is the special attention they pay to the plastic and evolving matrix of

relationships that constitutes the real target for the analysis of action, in other words, the

practices. This study draws its inspiration from these fields.

2.3. The bits (the so-called data5)

2.3.1. Information sources and related data

Following to Piccardo e Benozzo (1996: 104), I classified my information

sources as follows:

1. “Organizational life footprints: physical artifacts and written texts;2. collective events;3. the subjects themselves with their verbalized expressions, both natural – observed during

the organized action – and artificial – solicited by our requests.In the first case the subjects are called informants (data providers through everydaybehavior); in the second respondents (data providers through their answers to theresearcher’s questions)”

With regards to the first category, I observed and took pictures of material

artifacts both high-tech and low-tech, such as computers and related software and

bulletin boards, filing archives and furniture.

Written texts I gathered were marketing leaflets, the website, forms and notices

hanging in the offices, VD Business Plan. I couldn’t have access to the budget, for

privacy reasons.

2.3.2. The email exchange between Subcontractors, Project

Managers and Clients

Textual footprints of organizational life are the emails exchanged between

Project Managers and Subcontractors and between Project Managers and Clients;

5 Latins called data “things that are given”, say, stuff that is already there. I would prefer the term capta

or constructa, to remind how they are the result of the researcher’s intentional activity.

36

I could select, collect and analyze 299 email messages relating to 7 different

projects accomplished by VD staff, and several other messages presenting the terms

Question or Info in the subject line.

2.3.3. Collective Events

The few meetings that took place while I was an intern at VD were too private

for me to participate, since external guests were invited, and therefore the only

observations I could jot down were form outside, from the backstage, so to speak.

2.3.4. The subjects

With regards to the people as information source, the data I produced can be

classified as follows:

1. fieldnotes, not systematic, but rather taken after particular events that hit

my attention.

2. 10 ethnographic interviews, fully transcribed6, but without using the

Jefferson’s code. More precisely, I interviewed:

• the principal, Natasha, twice;

• the Office Manager, Florence, also twice;

• the Project Manager Vivian, in two occasions;

• the Project Manager Hilke, who quit the job while I was there, in two

different moments, one before and one after she left;

• the system administrator, Igor, in a single 2 hour long interview.

I also interviewed one Subcontractor, Lee, a Mexican living in San

Diego, whom I asked the same questions I posed in the websurvey (see

below).

I personally experienced the Subcontractor role translating and

proofreading a couple of short projects from English to Italian.

6 The technique used to transcribe the interviews might be of some interest: a) I recorded the interviews

first, using a common microcassette recorder; b) then I converted the content into an audio file on myhard-drive, simply connecting the recorder earphone output to the external microphone input jack onmy computer, via a common mono-mono cable; c) finally, I used shareware application (Listen&Type2.2) that associates the audio file to a word processor and allows you to play, stop, rewind theinterview using solely the keyboard, thus avoiding the tedious back and forth from the keyboard to therecorder buttons.

37

2.3.5. The websurvey

2.3.5.1. The websurvey construction and its goals

The choice of this investigation method has been the result of a compromise

between the impossibility to interview every Subcontractor personally and the time and

resources constraints I had.

The websurvey has been conceived gradually, only after having deeply

understood what the typical VD workprocess was.

According to the ethnographic approach mentioned above, I included many

open-end questions, in order to minimize the imposition of the researcher’s categories

on the respondents ones. With this purpose, several questions were left very vague.

Moreover, whenever a multiple choice question occurred, an “exit” option was there,

such as “other — please specify:” or “I don’t know”, so that to the respondent was

always left the possibility not to recognize her/himself in the set of suggested

alternatives.

For multiple choice questions I used almost solely nominal scales and rarely

ordinal scales. The statistical elaboration is descriptive, with simple frequency tables.

The questions targeted the following topics (see attachment 2):

1. the Subcontractor’s equipment: the respondents’ hardware and

software;

2. their relationship with technology: the computer expertise degree, the

technical problem solving strategies;

3. the job as translator and its characteristics: advantages, disadvantages,

schedules, the influence of the Internet;

4. the respondent as teleworker, with a specific focus on social interaction

aspects: were these Subcontractors really “loners” as the common sense

generally says?

5. interculturality, with questions relating to their origins and their living

abroad experiences, with the culture shocks they may had experienced;

6. the specific relationship with VD: the communication with the Project

Managers, the relational and technical problems occurring most often;

38

7. the possible existence of a subnetwork of sub-subcontractors, and the

communication with them;

8. the set of value hold as important for a translator teleworking as a

Subcontractor.

In a ninth section, optional, the respondents could share their online translation

resources (links, mailing lists, dictionaries, etc.) with their colleagues working

for VD.

Finally, in the last page, an optional question asked to suggest a metaphor to

represent VD and another question explicitly asked how the respondent saw the

relationship between cultural background and computer-mediated

communication.

Besides the evident goal to acquire a panoramic view on the pool of

Subcontractors, the websurvey aimed to identify whether there was a discrepancy

between the typical Subcontractor profile as represented by the Project Managers, and

the characteristics emerging from the Subcontractors selves. To do this, I asked the

Project Managers to answer the online survey pretending to be the typical

Subcontractor. The comparison was then between two mental representations: the

abstraction made by the Project Managers and the picture the Subcontractors wanted to

convey.

2.3.5.2. The websurvey specificity

This research technique is fairly new, and there is still little academic literature

about it: two disciplines that first addressed this topic are sociology and computer

science (Schmidt, 1997; Kaye, Johnson, 1999; Witte, Amoroso, Howard, 2000;

MacElroy, 2000).

In this study no sampling was needed, since I contacted all the VD

Subcontractors classified as translators or editors or proofreaders.

The advantages of this technique are the following:

• no printing costs;

• no solicits costs;

• no response mailing costs;

39

• no data entry costs;

• no ambiguous answers due to smeared pencils signs;

• no unwanted question skipping.

Moreover, being a “new” technique if compared with traditional paper-and-

pencil questionnaires, it might generate a “novelty effect” fostering motivation

to answer.

The disadvantages are:

• people need to be online while answering the whole websurvey, since a CGI7

program on the server is needed to record the answers;

• waiting times between a questionnaire page and the following are variable,

due to the unpredictable conditions of the particular Internet connection

between the respondent’s computer and the server where the websurvey

resides;

• currently there is no built-in feature capable of count how many people

abandoned the websurvey after having answered a few questions.

• Prof. W. C. Schmidt of Buffalo University (who developed the application

and very generously makes it available to everyone who can demonstrate to

be affiliated with an academic institution or want to use it for non-

commercial use) can provide little technical assistance, since he does it as a

voluntary service.

The particular software I used, “WWW Survey Ass is tant”

(http://or.psychology.dal.ca/~wcs/hidden/home.html), has more specific features like:

• user-friendliness (no programming know-how needed);

• being a freeware for academic and non-commercial use;

• being a java applet, therefore completely cross-platform;

• immediate feedback to the respondent (frequency tables with bar graphics

for the previous respondents’ answers);

• very simple filling up techniques (clicking with the mouse);

• allowing all sort of questions: test questions (one correct answer) multiple-

choice questions with one or more eligible answers, open-end questions

7 Common Gateway Interface.

40

(both fill-the-blank and fill-the-text-area formats) and to some extent even

Likert scales questions;

• allowing skip patterns to tailor each respondent set of questions;

• with minimal HTML knowledge, allowing very precise layout control,

included pictures and tables;

• data are stored in ASCII format, comma separated, therefore easily

importable into every statistical software, accessible on the web via

password

• duplicate entries checking;

The final version of the questionnaire is available for testing at:

http://or.psychology.dal.ca/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~wcs/Saprojects/brunus/VD.pl

(Obviously, every reference to the real name of VD and the VD logo have been

removed).

The time required to answer the whole questionnaire was pretty long: around 20-

30 minutes, depending on how lengthy the open-end answers were.

The total number of questions varies between 48 and 54, depending on the skip

pattern, and includes multiple choice questions (31÷35), generally obligatory, and open-

end ones (17÷19), covertly optional, so that if skipped the respondent will not be asked

to go back and answer them in order to proceed.

41

Chapter 3

Data analysis and results

3.1. Written documents

Most of the written documents I could collect were commercial leaflets, yellow

pages ads, the business plan and the website. Although these texts were important to

build an initial overview on VD and its public image and to help understand its

organizational culture, they did not specifically relate to the relationship I am focusing

on in this study, namely the VD-Subcontractors relationship. Therefore, I chose not to

perform an in-depth analysis of these materials, after a general one.

3.1.1. Fieldnotes

According to Lofland & Lofland (1995: 90-98), taking fieldnotes should be as

systematic and regular as possible. In this case, my double role of intern and researcher

did not allow me to spend time in the office simply observing and writing down notes.

Therefore I took few fieldnotes only when something unusual happened and I had the

impression that something was not going as expected by the VD staff: be it a tense

conversation during a phone call with a Subcontractor or a Client, or a Project Manager

complaining with the system administrator, etc.

An analysis of these occasional fieldnotes must be done on three different levels:

• form the point of view of a rich awareness of the workprocess, this analysis

has a limited value: the distributed nature of the process (Hutchins, 1995)

presents to the observer some “emergent” aspects — the Project managers’

manifest behavior — and some immersed aspects — the communications

with remote interlocutors. As in the classic iceberg metaphor, the

disproportion between the little that is visible and the much that is not,

makes almost impossible a satisfactory comprehension of what is going on;

42

• from the point of view of a deep knowledge of VD organizational culture,

this analysis has a much higher value, since it allowed to better understand

the cooperation dynamics among the different staff members;

• unexpectedly, the most significant value of these fieldnotes has been the self-

monitoring function they had, allowing me to become aware and check up

how good or bad the interpersonal relationships with my informants were,

and to adjust my behavior in order to improve them. This was particularly

important with regard to my legitimization as researcher, an inherently nosy

and unwelcome character.

3.1.2. The interviews

The interviews were composed of a set of general questions aiming to obtain

different descriptions of the company’s culture. The interviews were exploratory and a

second round of them was planned in order to focus on more specific topics, but the 70

days of my internship were not enough to accomplish this task. Consequently, I have

used the transcription to enrich my comprehension of VD organizational culture and to

better interpret the email exchanges between the Project Managers and the

Subcontractors, plus the answers I collected through the websurvey.

3.2. The email exchanges analysis

3.2.1. Structural analysis

3.2.1.1. The email management system

The software used to handle the incoming and outgoing mail at VD was

Netscape Communicator 4.73‰.

Every PC in the office is 24h/24 connected to a IMAP mailserver online: each

Project Manager shares some specific folders (“prj”,”job”,”sent”) with the other Project

Manager in order to ensure replaceability in case someone is absent and cannot finish a

project.

43

The incoming mail is automatically filtered according to a couple of specific

abbreviations that should be always present in the subject line: PRJ# — for project —

and JOB#. The declared functions of this filter were two:

1. to facilitate the Project Manager distinguishing the email exchanges with the

Clients (PRJ) and those with the Subcontractors (JOB). The number besides

the abbreviation will identify the particular project;

2. to facilitate the back up of accomplished projects.

In reality, these abbreviations were not used systematically, with the exception

of Vivian and her Subcontractors. Often the Project Managers selves — especially

Florence and Galina — were omitting to indicate the project or job number on their

emails, and identified them by a recurring subject line. This was flagrantly in

contradiction with the signature notice appearing at the bottom of each message:

“|==================IMPORTANT================||--please do not remove the project number--||--from the “Subject:” field of your reply--||--------it assures that your message-------||---------will be delivered promptly--------|

|==================IMPORTANT================|

To the single Project Manager there was no big difference, since she had

followed the project form the beginning and, as every email user knows, it is fairly

common to handle multiple email exchanges simultaneously with different people

without getting confused. Moreover, the Netscape Communicator’s “Search

messages...” feature allows to search through a huge number of email simply using

some ad hoc criteria (date, keywords, recipient and such); on the contrary, for the

system administrator, who is responsible for the back up, this “disobedience” was an

hassle, since it made much more difficult to select and group all the messages relating to

one project not having a number to refer to. This is a typical example of the discrepancy

between a system designer’s mental model and a system user’s one (Bannon, 1990;

Mantovani, 1995).

Another example illustrates even better how the widespread belief that what is

efficient is automatically also effective is often false. In fact, the mailserver shared

folders were never used as planned by Igor, that is to say to allow immediate

substitution in case of emergency: when Hilke quit the job for good, leaving some

projects uncompleted, Vivian, who had to take her place, went directly on Hilke’s PC

44

and searched through her emails using Netscape searching feature. Ideally, if every

Project Manager had followed scrupulously Igor’s indications, Vivian could have had

access to all the needed messages directly from her PC, no matter where in the world

she was. Actually, she preferred to sit on Hilke’s place and “play her part” fully. Why

so? I would suggest that this strategy is perceived as more familiar and concrete than the

“virtual” one. But above all, she implicitly knew that doing so she would have not cut

off any “irregular” or “uncoded” cues that could have been potentially important to

comprehend how the ongoing project was developing.

In my research I had to reconstruct the projects’ history using the just mentioned

“Search messages...” feature. I carried out this reconstruction connecting to the VD

mailserver from my home in Italy, once I come back at the end of my internship, in

other words: teleworking myself. I could realize how difficult it was, sometimes, to

gather all the messages relating to a single project without the possibility to rely on a

project number in the subject line, having instead to track it down as a detective who

attempts to mount a jigsaw puzzle adding the pieces one by one: I searched by sender,

keywords and quoted messages. At the end, there is never the certainty to have selected

all the relevant messages: some could still be missing, or might have been sent to the

private addresses of the Project Managers, and therefore not being shared on the

mailserver. Some of these gaps are evident, i.e. when someone quotes a part of a

message of which there is not any trace elsewhere. Some other times they are

undetectable, such as a phone conversation that is inherently “footprintless”, unless

some reference to it is made within the email. Consequently, all reconstruction is a

hypothesis and can hardly be verified. The only way would have been to submit the

interpretation to the Project Manager involved in the analyzed projects, but this has not

been possible, since the Project Managers were not available to invest their time in this

activity and I was in Italy when I did the analysis.

3.2.2. Operative analysis

3.2.2.1. Email messages coding

The development of a classification method to code the email exchange has been

a gradual process, started from the simple description of the message content and

45

proceeded with the introduction of ever more sophisticated distinctions. Some examples

will follow.

In table 3 you can see the summary of a single project analyzed.

Table 3. Analyzed project summary

Project name: “Engine manual”Project Managers: Florence & Vivian (-08)

People involved: 6

Florence, Vivian,Client (C, -08),Lucio (T, +01),Julio (T, -03),Aleardo, Brazilian as Vivian, (T, -06)

First message date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 17:12:10 -0800Last message date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 09:09:50 -0800

Total number of exchangedmessages: 113 Project total

duration: 79 days

Time zone differences:

VD-Lucio= 9h => overlapping: 1h (8:30-9:30VD, 17:30-18:30 Lucio)VD-Julio= 5hVD-Aleardo= 2h

Project description:

PRJ 1734 + 1741: Post-editing of an engine manual inItalian, Spanish and Portuguese.This implies an extra middle man compared toregular projects, since who originally wrote themanual in English, sent it to an automatic translationcompany to translate it; this company is VD Client(C), since it asked VD to do the post-editing fromrobot-translation to human-translation, so to speak.

The digits in blue are the time zone differences with reference to the Greenwich

Meridian Time (GMT): Netscape Communicator’s Messenger automatically stamps the

sender local time and besides the relative difference with Greenwich time. In table 3 -

0800 means that the stamped time is 8 hours less than GMT (minus sign) or otherwise

said, that the GMT is 8 hours ahead.

In the Italian translator (T) case, Lucio, the time difference is 9 hours, thus

shrinking the overlapping office hours to just one: 8:30-9:30 for VD and 17:30-18:30

for Lucio).

Table 4 is an example of analyzed message.

Table 4. Example of analysis of an email message.

Keys to colors interpretation:

Workprocess = Parts of the message directly related to the workprocess

Problem & Solution = Parts of the message related to problem notification and suggested solution to it

Technicalities = technical aspects of the message (i.e. reference to communication occurred over another medium)

Redundancy = Parts of the message aiming to increase communication — and consequently workprocess — robustness

Courtesy and Public Image Management Strategies = Parts of the message aiming to establish and maintain a good professional relationship

Interpersonal Communication = Parts of the message related to interpersonal relationship care

Availability and Accessibility = Parts of message containing reference to the interlocutors availability and accessibility

# Heading f Message Body Tech Type ofmove

Comments/Interpretation

2 Subject:JOB# 1741Date:Thu, 09 Nov 2000 10:47:33 -0800It is 12:47 for Aleardo3 days after the Client has approvedthe VD estimate

From:Vivian

To:Aleardo<Aleardo@Aleardoserver.br>

DATE_DUE: 12/05/2000

PROJ_MAN: Vivian Pessoa

LANG_PAIR: Engl. > B. Portuguese

Dear Aleardo,

As we just discussed on the phone, I have Seal Course &Engine Course attached and zipped.There are 4 zips, English & Portuguese for each Course.If you agree to work on this job, the priority for deliveringis the Engine Course.The final deadline is Tuesday 12/05, but I would like to splitthe delivery.

Deadline in 25daysB.Portoguese=Brazilian P.

Othermedium: phone

Attachments:467k

Template

ConfirmationInformationNegotiationJobacceptance,Priority,DeadlineProposal

Vivian uses a pre-arranged templateExample of localization:Vivian specifies that thetarget language isPortuguese for theBrazilian market“Dear <name>“ in thiscase is a rather formalsalutation: being Italian ithas been sometimesdifficult to assess the“formality level” used ineach message.Reference tocommunication onanother mediumThe negotiation tone iscourteous, but notrhetorical: it seems toassume the real possibilityof a refusal by the T.

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Please let me know how your schedule would be.

Please send me your confirmation asap.

Thank you very much.Sincerely,

Vivian PessoaProject Manager

EngineCourse

Portuguese.zip

EngineCourseEnglish.zip

SealCourse ,Portuguese.zip

RedundancyRequest forfeedback onjoborganizationConfirmationrequest fornegotiationacceptanceFormal thanksand standardsalutations

assume the real possibilityof a refusal by the T.

Vivian leaves a decisionmargin to T, setting himfree to manage how tosplit the job batches.

The gentle “please” iscounterbalanced by arougher “asap”.

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48

49

The first column from the left (#) contains the message ordinal number for the

group of messages belonging to this project. The left margin is thick for the messages

sent in one day, thin for the following day ones, and so on.

The second column contains the common email heading. The text in the subject

line is marked whenever includes the codes “PRJ” or “JOB”. When the sender’s or

recipient’s timestamp is outside the normal office hours (8:30-18:30), then it is written

in bold. The interlocutor’s correspondent time is written besides. Moreover whenever

the message has multiple recipients (i.e. CC:), this is marked as lateral communication.

The third column (f) is colored in order to identify at a glimpse who are the two

interlocutors for that message. Slightly different colors were chosen to indicate the

direction of the exchange as well, as illustrated below (table 5):

Table 5. Each color identifies a specific couple of interlocutors and the frequency of

their exchanges.

Client<->Vivian Client<->FlorenceLucio -> Florence Florence -> LucioAleardo -> Vivian Vivian -> Aleardo

Julio -> Vivian Vivian -> Julio

Moreover, the time span between a message and the previous with the same

interlocutor is recorded in this column, thus enabling his/her readiness assessment.

The fourth column contains the full text of the message. The logic underlying

the colors attribution aims to identify a limited set of recurring categories of meaning,

thus uncovering the communication routines and negotiation strategies adopted by the

single interlocutors. At first, I made some very rough distinctions between what was

written to accomplish the job properly and what was or was not written in order to

establish and maintain a good interpersonal relationship, i.e. wishes, warm salutations,

etc. Soon these distinctions appeared to be insufficient and I introduced some new

categories: having to attribute a color to each part of the message has the advantage to

force the researcher to continuously question whether her/his categories fit or do not fit

the text. This categorization process continued until I felt I had a manageable set of

categories, sufficiently stable and exhaustive. The complete list of them is presented

below.

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Workprocess

This color is attributed to those parts of the message directly relating to the

workprocess. This includes every negotiation referring to the work variables:

ß the project description and the related job offer;

ß the price/translations rates;

ß the delivery deadline;

ß the priority order of the documents to be translated;

ß other specific instructions.

Redundancy

This category includes:

All the feedback requests to the interlocutor, direct — questions — and

indirect — i.e. “Please let me know...”.

All the confirmation requests (job has been accepted, attachments have been

received and open, job description is clear);

These “conversational moves” have a double function:

a) they strengthen the workprocess (Hutchins, 1995), creating a

communication system capable to immediately detect almost any

problem that may occur, and therefore to fix it;

b) they become a turn-taking routine similar to what in walky-talky

conversation is the signal “(...) over”.

Availability and Accessibility

Obviously, the person who requests a feedback or a confirmation implicitly

declares to be available for receiving an answer from the other party. Nonetheless,

this availability is often explicitly remarked with different specifications:

• as availability for questions and clarifications;

• as availability for negotiation (flexibility);

• as generic availability for whatever the interlocutor might need.

In certain rare cases, the interlocutors were expanding their accessibility by

giving their home phone number or their personal email address, in order to show

trust and enable the other party to contact them even outside the regular times, for

example during the weekend:

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giving their home phone number or their personal email address, in order to show

trust and enable the other party to contact them even outside the regular times, for

example during the weekend:

«If you are planning to look [at it] over the weekend, you can email me onFlorence@Florenceserver.com and if not, I will be in touch with you on Monday».

Courtesy and Public Image Management

This color identifies chunks of message such as courteous, polite and

professional expressions, quite formal and standard.

For example:

• opening and closing salutations («Dear <name>,»; «Yours sincerely,»);

• conditional sentences or requests («I would really appreciate if you

could (…)»; «When you have a moment could you kindly (…)»)

• ritual thanks («Thank you for your time and attention.»), which also

serve as «(...) over» signal for turn-taking;

• the expression «please» used frequently and everywhere;

Other intervention to be included in this category are those in which the

interlocutor shows off his/her professionalism talking about sophisticated

translation software or being extremely zealous in his/her translations; or even

sentences like:

«As far as I am aware, I HAVE sent you all the files already»

in which it is evident that the person is sure about having sent the files, but pretends

s/he can be wrong to be courteous.

Interpersonal Communication

I used this red for parts of message that go beyond the strictly professional

tone for a more informal one. For example:

«I hope you had a good weekend»

«Have a nice journey/vacation»

Another example is the passage from the formal «Dear Vivian» to a more friendly

«Hi Vivian!»: this can be considered a strategy for maintaining a good interpersonal

relationship, and only in a second place, a professional one. Another evidence

belonging to this category is the use of emoticons or smileys [ :-) ]. Finally the

thanks expressions in those cases in which there are some cues to make evident that

it is not just courtesy («Thank you»), but authentic gratitude («Thank you very very

much!»).

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relationship, and only in a second place, a professional one. Another evidence

belonging to this category is the use of emoticons or smileys [ :-) ]. Finally the

thanks expressions in those cases in which there are some cues to make evident that

it is not just courtesy («Thank you»), but authentic gratitude («Thank you very very

much!»).

Problems & Solutions

The part of the messages related to problem notifications and suggested

solutions (underlined) are marked with deep blue.

These problems might be technical or procedural, i.e. when the translator

complains that s/he has not enough context information to translate properly.

Generally, together with the problem notification, the sender proposes a possible

solution, thus accelerating the resolution process. Other examples can be

misunderstanding on what has to be translated and what not.

Technicalities

This category entails all references to technical aspects of the

communication present in the messages. These are:

• attachments name, size and file format;

• reference to other communication means (fax, phone, efax);

• presence or absence of a message thread quoted at the bottom of the

message;

• the possible use of the “automatic receipt request” by the sender;

• the use of a priority level different from the normal one (high or

highest).

The fifth column is dedicated to the extensive specification of this last category.

The sixth column contains instead the specification of the conversational move

identified within the text. These term is inspired to the ‘60s concept of linguistic act, as

it was conceived by the English analytic school: mainly Austin, Grice(????) and Searle.

I preferred to use the expression conversational move because in my analysis I did not

53

use the terms and concepts developed by those authors — such as constative and

performative (Austin, 1962), or locutory, illocutory — direct and indirect (Searle, 1975)

—, perlocutory (Austin, 1975). I limited myself to a less sophisticated and more

intuitive classification, distinguishing among:

• “solemn” promises («I will send you…»);

• commitment («I am planning to deliver tomorrow the last file…»);

• direct questions;

• feedback requests/soliciting;

• confirmation requests;

• proposal and suggestions;

• signal «...over»;

• negotiation about: job acceptance, price/rates, delivery, priority order;

• objections;

• misunderstandings;

• information/clarifications/explanations for workprocess;

• wishes;

• thanks;

• acknowledgements/congratulations;

• salutations (opening and closing);

• blackmail («I will fax to you the job spec, but I do need to receive your

Subcontractor agreement first.»);

• apologies — to be intended as admission of guilt but not of responsibility:

“I am sorry, I have not been able to provide you with any background information.Normally our clients are very helpful with this type of information but unfortunately,this particular person has not been.”

In this passage the Project Manager expresses to the translator her sense of

guilt, but she attributes the responsibility to a third party, the Client.

• Justifications — to be intended as admissions of responsibilities but not of

guilt:

“I didn’t send you the <name> project last week as I promised because I foundsome missing files”

In this case the sender admits the responsibility of the trouble, but “there were

some good reasons”, therefore he does not feel guilty.

54

In the seventh and last column are noted all the comments and interpretation

generated by the chromatic analysis I have just described. In this area I attempted to

uncover what is normally implicit, that is to say to let emerge all the underlying

assumptions plausibly coherent with the ongoing communication. The goal was to

capture its evolution in time.

This is the process that Gumperz (1992: 230) called contextualization, namely a

recurring attempt to

«(…) retrieve the presuppositions [one] must rely on in order to maintainconversational involvement and assess what is intended»

Moreover in this column all these absences that seemed to be meaningful for the

whole analysisare included. For example, a missing opening salutation appeared to

indicate tight discourse continuity with the previous message, generally sent a little

earlier.

It must be noted that to attribute a single color to a chunk of text is sometimes

hard, since the same expression could legitimately belong to more than one category,

the meaning being distributed in different “layers”, so to speak. In these cases I used the

color of the category that seemed to prevail, but I would specify in the fifth and sixth

column the multiple meaning of that expression.

3.2.2.2. Communication rules identification

Once all the messages were coded as described above, I went through the whole

projects attempting to recognize the negotiation, institution and use of a set of

communication rules and routines.

One of such routines is to first contact the Subcontractor via phone and then to

formalize the verbal agreement in a written form, sending detailed email. This practice

seems to be used by all the Project Managers for both new and old Subcontractors.

Generally, the job assignment message includes expressions like:

“As we just discussed over the phone…”(see Table 4)

Why so? There are several reasons for this behavior: as explained above, when

the Project Manager has to choose a Subcontractor for a job, she has to verify whether

she already knows a translator who “fits” for that job. If this is the case, she will contact

him/her to make sure s/he is available to work on the project: if not, she will continue

55

searching asking someone else. Thus it is evident that the email would not be apt for

such a search, since it is asynchronous, that is to say that the Project Manager would

wait indefinitely for an answer that could take too long to arrive, before contacting

someone else.

Another reason is related to the phone higher effectiveness for negotiation, compared to

email. In every negotiation, the ability of the negotiators is their capacity to quickly

interpret the other party’s conversational move and to “adjust” their following move in

the most convenient way, assuming the will reach an agreement. Ethnomethodology has

widely shown how dense of meaning a common dialogue can be. Turnover can be very

fast: definitely much faster than the one allowed with email; over this medium in fact,

the “cost” of every turn in terms of attention, time and effort is much higher than with a

synchronous medium, like the phone. Even if both interlocutors were constantly online

and could receive the message immediately, to open it, read it and reply could never be

as quick as with a synchronous medium. Moreover, the meaning richness and

sophistication conveyable through paralinguistic communication are hardly transferable

in static written text. Here I am not saying that it is absolutely impossible to transfer this

richness in a written text: writing allows to weight carefully the words and to calibrate

the meanings in the most sophisticated way (simply think of poets and lovers’ letters).

But this granted, what is still questionable is efficiency: most of the times using email

implies multiple threads management, chronologically intertwined. The messages

frequency and quantity generally severely constraint the possibility to pay as much

attention to words choice. These reasons make email a quite inefficient medium for

negotiation (Morris, Ogan, 1996; Riva, 2000).

A further proof emerges from the Subcontractors’ answer to the following question in

the websurvey:

Under which circumstances do you prefer to use the phone instead of sending an email?

The Subcontractors’ most frequent motivation is urgency, that is to say the need

of an immediate answer that only a synchronous medium can offer:

“When I have an urgency to contact someone, and I’m not sure they’ll check/receive

56

their e-mail soon.”

The second reason is when they need to negotiate:

“I prefer to use the phone when a discussion is necessary, when I have severalquestions and I need the answers in order to ask the next question. But email is fine formost things.”

Summarizing,

“(…) in the asynchronous CMC two typical aspects of conversational processes aremissing:ß the participants’ commitment to collaborate and their cooperation while

formulating the message;ß those feedback elements that allow immediate message processing on a social

level.” (Riva, 2000: 209)

What is negotiated?

The websurvey answers confirm what emerges from the electronic

correspondence analysis; the Subcontractors say the phone is used for the initial

negotiation on the job acceptance and its details:

"Initial negotiation on terms for an assignment, particularly if urgent"

“Generally I prefer e-mail, but for negotiating the fine points of a project or workingout details as a project changes/takes shape, I prefer the telephone.”

Another negotial use is related to interactive problem solving:

«When a problem needs to be interactively solved and/or discussed I prefer the phone.»

or for clarification of obscure instructions that would take too long to write

down:

“When it’s a problem and you would spend forty minutes writing an email. Sometimes afive minute phone call will do the trick and save you time.”

Once the project and job guidelines have been negotiated over the phone, the

remaining details are defined via email. This second negotiation level is more formal

and implies an intense email traffic: in the first 10 days (13% of the total duration of the

project mentioned in table 3 and 4) almost 40% of all the messages were exchanged.

These uneven distribution patterns reproduce itself in the other projects I analyzed as

well. This effect is obviously more evident in long run projects, whereas it is hardly

distinguishable in short ones.

After this first phase, the email exchange becomes less frequent while the

translator works on his/her own. The only messages are generally some questions from

57

the Subcontractor when something is unclear, or from the Project Manager who just

wants to make sure that everything is going on smoothly and the deadline is going to be

respected.

The last phase includes and follows the translated document delivery. During

this time, the email traffic gets more intense due to the simultaneous presence of the

Client’s and Subcontractor’s emails.

The last stage after the delivery is the feedback given to the Subcontractor by the

Project Manager: if she is satisfied, she normally reassures the Subcontractor that she

will contact her/him as soon as a fitting project arises and wishes herself to work again

with her/him. In the interview Vivian has stressed the importance of establishing a long

lasting relationship with her Subcontractors, building what she calls a “team”, since

having to search for new translators implies a lot of uncertainty.

Table 6 summarizes what has been said so far on this topic:

Table 6. Typical job conclusion with a Subcontractor.

“Dear Vivian,(…) Thank you very much; I’ve enjoyed working with you, and I hope to do it againsoon.Best Regards,Emily

“Dear Emily,Thank you very much for all your hard work. I really appreciate that!!I have enjoyed working with you as well.As soon as I receive a new job which matches your expertise, I will contact you.When you have a chance, please send to me your invoice for those 3 files you workedon. ThanksOnce again, thank you so much for all!!Have a great weekend!Sincerely,

Vivian.

The final moment for the whole project is represented by the electronic delivery

of the file — translated, edited and proofread — to the Client (Table 7)

Table 7. Example of delivery message for a completed project.

N. Heading f Message body Tech Conversational move

Comments/Interpretation

57 Subject:PRJ# 1546 <<last file finished>>Date:Fri, 23 Jun 2000 13:28:53 -0700From:Vivian

To:

Client@clientserver.com

0

CLIENT: Who Inc.CONTACT: Charles WhoDATE_DUE: 06/23/2000 PROJ_MAN: Vivian PessoaLANG_PAIR: English > Spanish (Mex.M.)===========================================Dear Charles,

As we had agreed,

I have the Final-Music Protocol V1.6_01_Spa (Edit).doc fileattached,which was translated and edited into Spanish for the MexicanMarket.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Please, as soon as you have a chance,send to me a confirmation that you received all of the 3 filesand you have everything as you were expecting.Thank you for your business.Sincerely,

Vivian Pessoa , Project Manager

Spa-MusicProtocolV1.6_01.zip(Edit) toavoidconfusion withpreviousversionsSpa.Indicates thelanguage

Template

Standardsalutation

ConfirmationDeliverynotificationRedundantinformationrehearsal

AvailabilityforclarificationCourteoustoneReceiptconfirmationrequest andfeedbackrequest oncustomersatisfactionFormal thanksandsalutations

Vivian is the only ProjectManager who uses atemplate that shecustomizes each time

Vivian with thisexpression “As we hadagreed” is subtlyemphasizing that theproject has been deliveredrespecting all thecondition agreed upon.This closing messagesummarizes the maincharacteristics of theprojectWhile stating heravailability, Vivianrenews her commitmentto the Client and givescontinuity to it by askingfor the usual receiptconfirmation in order toavoid misunderstandingand for the Client’sfeedback on customersatisfaction thus showinghigh professionalism

58

59

This message is followed by the Client’s confirmation, to which Vivian replies:

“Dear Charles,thank you very much for the confirmation you sent to me.(…)I would like to ask you, if you have a chance, to send me the final files that your teamhas proofread, then I can improve on our work for your next occasion. (…)”

This feedback request at the end of the process is extremely important for

several reasons.

The most obvious reason is the actual possibility to improve the quality of the

service offered, as Vivian explains in the interview:

VIVIAN: (…) sometimes you don’t get it right on the first job [with a new client],there’s a learning curve, there’s a process, that’s why we have old clients to whom wecan give good quality jobs, because before they were new clients and we spent timeworking back and forth, back and forth, adjusting, hiring new people, this is the realprocess (…)

But it is under a relational perspective that this conversational move is mostly

important. With it Vivian is negotiating her own image as a competent professional and

VD image as service provider company, proving to the Client that VD commitments

goes beyond “what has been paid” and invests in the relationship with him/her.

Through this humble attitude Vivian shows how VD cares for the customer satisfaction

more than it cares for the money, and hopes there will be further occasions to work

together.

From the point of view of the relationship with the Subcontractors this move is

equally important since the Subcontractors are very eager to receive the final product to

have feedback on their work, which is normally a rare occurrence. In the only interview

I had with a Subcontractor, Lee, he complained the of lack of feedback on his job as a

structural problem for his profession:

LEE: That’s one of the problems doing translations: if it’s a tech translation, and letssay an engine manual, it will be reviewed by engineers, which is great, I’ll get somefeedback from them, but the actual user will be a mechanic, and the mechanic, youknow, may have more questions and I never know about those so that is a problem inthat we don’t really have good feedback.

The feedback is structurally scarce since the final recipients of the translated

documents will not be the ones who wrote the documents, but those who will read

them, with whom the translator does not have any direct link. The only remedy to this

problem is to ask for as much information as possible. Subcontractors demonstrate to

60

appreciate the fact that VD is sensitive to this need offering to give as much feedback as

they can get from the Client. Thus they can improve as professionals for their own

business, and simultaneously they specialize becoming ever more “favorites” for the

Project Manager, in case another project with the same Client and subject comes in. It is

common that the Subcontractors use Microsoft Word “track changes” feature so that

the translator can see what the editor has corrected and “tune” his/her style for the next

time, thus increasing the whole workprocess efficiency. Another positive “byproduct”

of this procedure is the refining of the interaction routines between the Project Manager

and the Subcontractors and, in a vicarious way, even within the Subcontractors’ pool as

well. This emerges from more frequent informal expressions like «Have a nice

weekend!» or «Thank you very much and have a good evening!», from the use of

emoticons and finally from the response readiness: Julio and Vivian in a single day, (the

initial one with the job negotiation) exchanged 10 messages, 6 of them with less than 30

minutes interval. This promptness is one of the most appreciated characteristics of a

Subcontractor according to the Project Managers’ evaluation, but it can be seriously

compromised by the time difference, independently from the Subcontractor’s zeal.

3.2.2.3. Negotiation and meta-negotiation

With regards to this progressive familiarization process between Project

Manager, Subcontractors and their own modus operandi, it might help to distinguish

between the negotiation of work variables (job acceptance, rates, deadlines, priority)

and the meta-negotiation, namely the negotiation on the rules held to be legitimate for

negotiating those variables. This meta-negotiation is almost exclusively implicit,

meaning that the new Subcontractors learn the rules adopted by the Project Managers

while practicing them, with no explicit explanation. The Project Managers start out

assuming that the workprocess is sufficiently simple and straight-forward to be

universally known or at least easily learnable by every Subcontractor who, being an

expert translator, will certainly have received, translated and sent back files in other

occasions, while collaborating with other agencies. This is confirmed in the interviews

to the Project Managers. But a closer view reveals how this belief is not completely

correct. When analyzing the interaction between Vivian and two different

Subcontractors, where one of them – Aleardo – was working with her for the first time

61

while the other – Julio – had already worked with her several times, some specific rules

become evident. As shown in table 6, Vivian always specifies in the body of the

message the exact name of the attached files («Seal Course & Engine Course»), their

number and file format («They are 4 zips») and the languages («English & Portuguese

for each Course»). This habit is not fortuitous, rather it reinforces the communication

process, reducing the risk of a misunderstanding. In fact, if Vivian forgets to attach one

of the files, the recipient could realize the mistake and ask for the missing file. Aleardo

on the contrary is not so systematic, when he delivers the translated files he roughly

says in the message:

“ Here is the first batch of files. Please confirm receipt.”

Or elsewhere:

“Please find attached the translated files. Please confirm receipt.”

Although this formula contains the confirmation request, treating the files like a

single “heap” prevents the possibility to immediately verify if they are all they are

supposed to be.

Julio, on the other hand, adopts Vivian's method and writes the name of the file

in the body of the message thus notably reducing even the chance of forgetting to attach

the file and just send the message, as it happens sometimes. Another similar strategy is

Vivian’s habit to indicate both the date and the day of the week whenever a deadline is

mentioned, so that if the Subcontractor notices a discrepancy between the two s/he can

immediately ask for clarification. This is particularly important for Subcontractors using

a date format different from the US one. Similarly, the time zone difference may cause

some doubts and therefore there is a tacit rule such that each interlocutor who refers to a

time in the message, has to specify «(…) San Diego time» or «(…) your time».

In the few cases in which the meta-negotiation becomes explicit, it generally

refers to the requests for more information or for more time to decide whether to accept

the job at VD conditions or not. In the following example, Julio is not negotiating a

delivery date, he is rather negotiating the time allowed for the negotiation itself.

“(…) Regarding the delivery date, let us8 see how the rest of the work evolves duringthe next two days. OK?”

8 «(…) let us see…»: This form is due to the fact that Julio works together with his wife, who never

intervenes in the email exchange though.

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3.2.2.4. Problems notification and suggested solutions

Even if email is not very apt for quick negotiation, Subcontractors often use this

medium to work out, together with the Project Manager, whatever problem may arise.

The problems may be various:

• technical (i.e.: the file format is unknown to the Subcontractor’s computer

system);

• administrative (i.e.: the Subcontractors complain about belated payments);

• mainly operative (i.e.: doubts about translations, scarce clarity of the

assignments);

• mainly interpersonal (i.e.: impoliteness, mistrust, etc.).

The last to categories are hardly separable, since every operative problem — i.e.

someone missing the delivery deadline — has always a relational component as well —

i.e. a trustworthiness damage.

Besides the analysis of entire projects, this section is based also on the analysis of some

50 messages containing the terms «info» and «question» in the subject line.

With regards to the first category, the most frequent technical problems are:

• troubles opening attachments because of incompatibilities or because of a

scarce Subcontractor’s computer expertise;

• the unsatisfactory graphic reliability of fax transmission;

• time zone difference related troubles.

Two episodes will show how apparently futile technical accidents can hardly

hinder the workprocess.

The first one is from the engine manual project mentioned above (tables 3 and

4): Florence calls Lucio, an Italian translator, for the first time; she leaves a message on

his voicemail and then sends an email roughly explaining what VD is («VD is a

translation agency in San Diego, California») and eventually describes the project

asking Lucio whether he is interested in the job.

Lucio is interested.

In the following message Florence sends the Subcontractor agreement, as an

attachment, that Lucio has to sign and send back via fax in order to formalize the

63

collaboration. Lucio ignores this request and starts a quite dense exchange to negotiate

the work variables. This negotiation goes on for 4 days9; during this time the two

interlocutors exchange 18 messages: among these, only one (# 8) has been sent during

official office hours (8:30-18:30) for both, since, as explained above, 9 hours divide

Lucio and Florence (v. Table 8).

Table 8. Date and time of the messages exchanged between the Project Manager

Florence and Lucio, Italian Subcontractor.

# SenderSender’s date andtime Recipient

Recipient’s date andtime

Interval

(startingfrom 8:30)

1 Florence Fri, 10 Nov 200011:07

Lucio Fri, 10 Nov 200020:07

2 LucioFri, 10 Nov21:01 Florence

Fri, 10 Nov12:01 54’

3 FlorenceFri, 10 Nov14:09 Lucio

Fri, 10 Nov23:09 2h 8’

4 Florence Fri, 10 Nov14:17

Lucio Fri, 10 Nov23:17

8’

5 LucioSat, 11 Nov01:28

FlorenceFri, 10 Nov16:28

2h 11’

6 FlorenceFri, 10 Nov16:47 Lucio

Sat, 11 Nov01:47 19’

7 LucioMon, 13 Nov14:38 Florence

Mon, 13 Nov5:38

2 d a y s(Sun) 12 h49’

8 FlorenceMon, 13 Nov

09:28Lucio

Mon, 13 Nov

18:28

3 h 50’

(58’)

9 FlorenceMon, 13 Nov14:20 Lucio

Mon, 13 Nov23:20 4 h 52’

10 LucioTue, 14 Nov08:43 Florence

Mon, 13 Nov23:43

9 h 23’

(13’)

11 LucioTue, 14 Nov08:44

FlorenceMon, 13 Nov23:44

1’

12 FlorenceTue, 14 Nov

09:41Lucio

Tue, 14 Nov

18:41

9 h 57’

(1 h 11’)

13 FlorenceTue, 14 Nov13:28 Lucio

Tue, 14 Nov22:28 3 h 47’

14 Florence Tue, 14 Nov13:38

Lucio Tue, 14 Nov22:38

10’

9 Not counting the Sunday, where there were no messages.

64

15 LucioTue, 14 Nov22:54 Florence

Tue, 14 Nov13:54 16’

16 FlorenceTue, 14 Nov14:46 Lucio

Tue, 14 Nov23:46 52’

17 LucioWed, 15 Nov06:56 Florence

Tue, 14 Nov21:56

7 h 10’

(1 h 34’)

18 FlorenceWed, 15 Nov

10:01Lucio

Wed, 15 Nov

19:01

12 h 5’

(1 h 31’)

In four occasions Lucio receives and sends messages outside the traditional

office hours: in the evening (#2 and #15), very early in the morning (#17) and even very

late at night (#5). From the point of view of telework, this example represents one of the

reasons of the progressive blurring of the boundary between work time and leisure time.

With regard to the communicational efficiency instead, the last four messages show the

time dilatation due to such a large time zone difference; at last, after two solicitations,

Lucio sends his contract signed via fax and notifies it to Florence (#15). Florence

answers after only 52’ (#16), saying that she did not receive it, but in Italy it is already

23:46 and Lucio will not check his email until the next morning. Only then he will tell

Florence that the contract got jammed in his fax machine and therefore he had to send it

again (#17). The following day, when Florence arrives at the office and confirms she

received the fax (#18), for Lucio it is evening again and if he respected the common

office hours he would not read the message until the following day. With regard to

promptness, we have to consider a discrepancy between two indicators: the average

time interval between a message and its answer on one side, and the same measure

calculated considering the hypothetical entry in the office in the morning — namely

8:30 (into brackets in rightmost column, messages # 8, # 10, # 12, # 17, #18). For

example, in message # 10 Lucio answers at 8:43, that is full 9 hours and 23’ after the

message was sent, but actually only 13’ minutes after his hypothetical arrival in the

office. If we imagine Lucio strictly respecting the traditional office hours, this

correspondence will extend itself intolerably for VD needs, since he and Florence will

have only 1 hour a day to email each other: from 8:30 to 9:30 for her, that is from 17:30

to 18:30 for him.

65

The second episode (table 9) related to technical problems is illustrated in table

11 and it is meaningful for two reasons:

1. it is a rare example of availability not supported by accessibility;

2. it is an example of intercultural distance.

Table 9. Example of technical problem.

From to Body of the messageFlorence Russian

Subcontractor,Ivan

(…)I am attaching an efax10 for you which is the translation that I havebeen telling you about , a brochure for optical engineering.

I am not sure if you will be able to open it.

If you cannot open it, please can you provide me with a fax numberwhere I can send four pages for you.

(…)Ivan Florence (…)There’s indeed a snag in opening the attachment, I’ve only seen

the envelope.

Maybe you’ll send it in another format (I mean, MS Word-97).

As to our fax number, I hope that I’ll be able to send it to youtomorrow

but please take into consideration that there’s no fax at ourinformatics department nor at the mathematics faculty in thewhole,

and only our rector has one,

whereas there are hundreds of professors and instructors,

so, we could use it only within reasonable limits.

In this exchange we have a typical file format problem, since the Subcontractor

is unable to open the efax file and asks for a more familiar file format; but more

importantly, we discover that in a Russian university the only person having a fax

machine available is the rector. In other words, the fax machine, a device that is always

present in every American and European office, in this particular academic context is

not obvious. Such an unfulfilled expectation is here considered an example of culture

shock. Unfortunately, the email correspondence analysis has not provided other clear

examples of culture shocks, presumably because of the small sample of projects that I

analyzed (7) and because in these projects most of the Subcontractors had already

collaborated with VD for a while and were from “westernized” country (no Asian

Subcontractor was involved).

66

The most frequent administrative problems concern:

ß late payments, both by clients towards VD, and by VD towards

Subcontractors;

ß the need for an official contract or job order;

ß errors in invoicing.

To pay late is frequent for VD: in the interviews VD staff justifies this inconvenient

addressing the clients as responsible for generating the delay. The Project Managers

have to be very careful and skilled in order to mediate with Subcontractors, reassuring

them that “they themselves are waiting to be paid by their clients, who promised to pay

very soon, and so they should be patient a little longer”.

Beyond the business aspect, it is interesting to note how in some cases this delay plays a

role in the job negotiation for new projects. How? The Subcontractor may use this

recurring inefficiency to increase her/his contractual power, saying s/he will accept the

job only when the previous invoices will be paid:

“Vivian,I can do this job by Monday,but first I would like to resolve the issue of outstanding invoicesPlease let me know what the status is.Henry”

The tone is dry, softened just a bit by that conditional «I would like to». In this

case the conversational move is blackmail, even if courteous.

In another case the delay is used as a way to counterbalance an inconvenience caused by

a Subcontractor to VD: he had accepted a job and then had to turn it down because he

realized he could not respect the deadline. This episode is particularly meaningful since

it includes different kind of problems: technical, administrative, operative and their

spin-off on the relational plan. Thus I decided to transcribe the whole exchange here,

with the interpretation comments on the furthest right column (table 10).

10 It is a particular online service, offered by certain specialized websites (http://www.efax.com,

http://www.jfax.com) allowing sending and receiving faxes and voicemail on one's computer as imageor audio file attached to an email.

67

Table 10. Example of different types of problems occurring simultaneously.

Keys to colors interpretation:

Workprocess = Parts of the message directly related to the workprocess

Problem & Solution = Parts of the message related to problem notification and suggested solution to it

Technicalities = technical aspects of the message (i.e. reference to commuication occurred over another medium)

Redundancy = Parts of the message aiming to increase communication — and consequently workprocess — robustness

Courtesy and Public Image Management Strategies = Parts of the message aiming to establish and maintain a good professional relationship

Interpersonal Communication = Parts of the message related to interpresonal relationship care

Availability and Accessibility = Parts of message containing reference to the interlocutors availability and accessibility

N. Heading f Body of the message Tech Conversational move

Comments/Interpretation

5 Subject:

Re: JOB# 1587 <<B.2nd-ba>>

Date:

Tue, 18 Jul 2000 10:01:03 -0500

It is 08:01 for VivianFrom:

John

To:

Vivian

Dear VIVIAN:

I got your fax, but the last two pages of the third documentmust have got cut off.

But that aside, I will not have time to translate thedocuments, I’m sorry to say.

It turns out that I have too much work and toomany personal obligations to accept any other projects thismonth.

I’m sorry I didn’t realize this yesterday.

I will be sending two of the three files you sent earlier soon,and I will send the last on or before Friday.

Use of adifferentmedium(fax)Technicalproblem

Standardsalutation

ProblemnotificationJob refusal ofa projectpreviouslyagreed upon,over thephone.Relatedapologies.

Justification

Apologies

PromiseOperativeproblem:misseddeadline forthird filedelivery.

The fax is not veryreliable

The Subcontractoractivates a set of courtesystrategies aiming toreduce the inevitable gapthat his refusal has createdwith respect to Vivian’sexpectations.Notably the expression heuses is «It turns out that»:thus he is displacingoutside the locus ofcontrol, “softening” hisfault: it simply issomething that happenssometimes, like anaccident.

68

and I will send the last on or before Friday.

I will be away from home today andtomorrow, but if you need to, you can reach me on my cellphone at (xxx) xxx-xxxx.

Sincerely,John

misseddeadline forthird filedelivery.InformationAccessibility

Formalsalutation

sometimes, like anaccident.As compensation heconfirms he is going tosend two of the three filesto be translated today, andthe third will arrive onFriday, that is, 3 days late.Finally he seems todemonstrate his goodfaithand his commitment to fixthe problem he caused, byleaving his cell phonenumber, even if he is outfor private affairs.

6 Subject:

[Fwd: JOB# 1587 <<B.2nd-ba>>]

Date:

Tue, 18 Jul 2000 09:23:07 -0700

It is 11:23 for John

Vivian communicates John’s refusalto her colleague, Galina, one and halfhour after John sent it, but probablyshe is just arrived at the office.From: VivianTo: Galina

Galina,

To keep you informed...--Sincerely,

Vivian Pessoa

Project Manager

[John’s message follows quoted]

SalutationLateralcommunication in order toensureredundancy

The greeting is verydirect, no frills, very task-oriented.Galina is co-ProjectManager with Vivian, andtherefore Vivian keepsher informed about theproject progress in twoways: sending her in CC:the messages she sends tothe Subcontractors andforwarding her someimportant messages fromthe Subcontractors. Thismaintains the relationshipalive and collaborative

69

7 Subject:

Re: JOB# 1587

Date:

Tue, 18 Jul 2000 11:52:26 -0500

It is 09:52 for VivianFrom:

John

To:

Vivian

CC:Galina

John for the first time remembers toCC: Galina.

2h

Dear VIVIAN:

Here are two of the three files you sent to be translated.

Please note that in the first file, env.doc, I wasn’t sure of theclaimant, which I assumed to be the US Navy.

If this is wrong, please change the highlighted portion.

If this is correct, please delete the highlight.

I will be out of town for two days, but you can reach me onmy cell phone at (xxx) xxx-xxxx.

I have two administrative requests.

(1) Please send a work order for this project. I never receivedone.

(2) I have yet to receive payment for several translation jobs Idid earlier.

Could you please check on these for me?

I would be happy to resubmit an invoice.

So far, I have received payment for two jobs.

Thank you,John

Sent 2hoursafter thenotification ofmissingdeadlinefor thethirdfile.

Attachments:Part 1.2Type:Macintosh FilePart 1.3Type:Macintosh File

InformationAdmission ofan operativeproblem(translation)for lack ofcontextinformation

Pre-arrangedsolution

Reconfirmation ofaccessibility

Administrative requests(1) formalwork orderrequest(2) paymentrequestquestion (verypolite:conditional)Declaration ofcompleteavailabilityReceiptConfirmationStandardthanks

John has a translation

problem, but immediately

provides a possible

solution, proving very

zealous.

This reconfirmation ofavailability to becontacted can beconsidered as anothercourtesy strategy, to showparticipation to theproblem he generated.At this point though, Johndoes a countermove and“attacks” gently VD on itsweakness, namely thescarce formalization ofwork orders and the latepayments.John is very delicate onthis topic: he definitelywants to maintain apositive relationship.Specifying that hereceived the payments fortwo jobs, he is implicitlysaying that he is notaccusing VD to beinsolvent, but simplysolicit them for the delay.Moreover he does not say«...for only two jobs.» thatwould have bittered histone. On the other handthough, with thiscountermove he isrecalling VD faults, thusreassessing andminimizing his ownfaults. It sound a bit like:«Hey guys, nodoby isperfect, right?».

70

«...for only two jobs.» thatwould have bittered histone. On the other handthough, with thiscountermove he isrecalling VD faults, thusreassessing andminimizing his ownfaults. It sound a bit like:«Hey guys, nodoby isperfect, right?».

71

72

Banal mistakes in invoices can be “dangerous” if perceived as a violation of

initial agreements. In order to exclude this possibility Vivian takes advantage of the

email as a shared log — and therefore an indisputable one — of the previous

negotiations, as it is shown below (table 11, last column to the right):

73

Table 11. Example of technical-administrative problem with relational spin-off and its resolution.

Keys to colors interpretation:

Workprocess = Parts of the message directly related to the workprocess

Problem & Solution = Parts of the message related to problem notification and suggested solution to it

Technicalities = technical aspects of the message (i.e. reference to commuication occurred over another medium)

Redundancy = Parts of the message aiming to increase communication — and consequently workprocess — robustness

Courtesy and Public Image Management Strategies = Parts of the message aiming to establish and maintain a good professional relationship

Interpersonal Communication = Parts of the message related to interpresonal relationship care

Availability and Accessibility = Parts of message containing reference to the interlocutors availability and accessibility

N. Heading f Body of the message Tech Conversational move

Comments/Interpretation

62 Subject:

Re: JOB# 1546

Date:

Tue, 27 Jun 2000 10:57:20 -0700

It is 12:57 for Angelica

From:

Vivian

To:

Angelica

Dear Angelica,The invoice you sent to me yesterday has beenreceived.However, we had agreed $0.02 per word editedsince we have been working together.On 06/16/00 (4:55pm) I wrote to you: 1. The text must beedited for the Mexican Market.The deadline for this editing job is Monday (06/19) and therate is $0.02 per word, as we had discussed since we start towork on that...You agreed with that, remember...“We both agree in everything. Then, I’ll get to work onthis.”, you wrote 06/16/00 at 9:14pm.I believe there has been a misunderstanding on that.In the invoice you sent the rate is $0.04 instead $0.02.Could you please send to me a new invoice?Thank you very much.Sincerely,VivianProject Manager

ReceiptconfirmationProblemnotification

Literalquotation ofthe previousnegotiationProblemsuggestedexplanation

SolutionproposalFormal thanks

With a very calm and drytone, not accusatory, northreatening, Viviannotifies Angelica that herinvoice is incorrect. Withthis tone Vivian takes forgranted that she has nodoubts about Angelica’sgood faith, and afterhaving quoted theprevious messagescontaining the termsagreed upon, she declaresshe believes there was amisunderstanding.Consequently she offersto solve the problem bygently but firmlyrequesting a new,corrected invoice.

74

63 Subject: RE: JOB# 1546

Date:

Tue, 27 Jun 2000 16:35:44 -0500

It is 14:35 for VivianFrom:

Angelica

To:

Vivian

4

h

35’

Dear Vivian,You are so right!I’m sorry very much, I got confused because 0.02/word is4.40 for every 220 words, and then I had the idea of “4”.Anyway, I’m sending you the invoice corrected.

Sorry again, and thank you very much.Best regards,Angelica

Invoice1546.doc

Thepreviousmessageisentirelyquotedat theend ofthis one

LivelyexclamationApologiesJustificationAcceptance ofVivian’ssuggestedsolutionFurtherapologies andthanks formalsalutation

The Subcontractorrecognizes immdiately herfault and Vivian’srightness: in this way sheavoids any possible doubton her own good faith.She justifies herself andthen complies withVivian’s suggestedsolution.

75

64 Subject:

Re: JOB# 1546 <<i>>

Date:

Tue, 27 Jun 2000 16:55:12 -0700

It is 18:55 for Angelica

From:

Vivian

To:

Angelica

2

h

20’

Dear Angelica,

There is no problem at all!

We all do that when we have so much going on ...

Do not worry, I understand it!!The invoice you just sent to me is on the way. You will get

the payment in 30 days.

If you have any questions about that, you can email Irina at:

irina@VD.com.

She is the person who takes care of accountant.

Thank you very much for all your hard work.

As I told you, as soon as I receive a new job that matches

your expertise, I will contact you. Thanks

Sincerely,

Vivian Pessoa

Project Manager

MinimizationEmpathyReassurance

Update andpromise

Optionalrequest forfeedback andavailabilitydeclaration

Informationabout VDThanksConfirmation

Furtherreassuranceand thanks

In this message Vivianfirst wants to reassureAngelica, that is to sayshe cares for theirinterpersonal relationship,beyond the professionalone.Then she specifies theeffect of the correctionfrom the workprocesspoint of view, commitingon VD behalf to pay herin 30 days.This expression («If youhave any questions aboutthat») is very frequent andestablishes a sort of“silence means ok” rule,with which, after a seriesof “Over”, we get to thefinal “Over”.The availabilitydeclaration and theexplanation about whoIrina is, can be consideredas opening up VD to theSubcontractor, in order toincrease familiarity withher. After the ritualthanks, Vivian spends fewmore words to newlyreassure Angelica, thusresetting the originalharmony in therelationship.

76

77

Mainly operative problems are doubts about the translation that Subcontractors

cannot resolve on their own, since a question to the source of the document (VD Client)

is required.

In some of these cases, email proves efficient because it allows to describe in

fine details what the doubt is about and to forward it to the VD client via the Project

Manager, avoiding any distortion. Imagine this process happening over the phone: the

Project Manager does not have a specialized expertise in the subject, as the Client and

the Subcontractors do, and so she could not guarantee to explain the Subcontractor’s

problem to the client properly. This communication interference would happen on the

way back as well, from the Client to the Subcontractor.

With email instead, VD can operate effectively as “middle man” without having

to put the Client and the Subcontractors in direct contact with each other: this contact

would be a threat to the very existence of VD, since it could allow the Client to skip the

translation agency dealing directly with translators.

Problems on an interpersonal level are less frequent (at least in the projects I

analyzed). The most meaningful one I have found is a Brazilian Subcontractor’s attempt

to establish an extra-professional email correspondence with Vivian, who is also

Brazilian.

First off, he asks her whether she has a personal email address, without explaining why

he is asking so:

“(…)By the way, do you have a home e-mail?”

Vivian, facing such a mysterious request, adopts the good faith principle and

interprets the request as a professional one, i.e. an accessibility request outside the

regular office hours:

“(…)P. S.: Since I spend so much time on the computer here at the office, I do not access mypersonal email at home at all.Even if I were to give you that email address, you would not be able to get in touch withme at home.For that reason, when there is anything urgent I give only my home phone number.”

At this point Juliano comes out and explains that:

“Anyway, I wanted to know it (if operational) to use it to exchange ideas not directlyrelated to the translation jobs, for which I don’t consider a ‘company’ email address

78

appropriate.If you have a personal account that you check at least once a week, it would do.”

In the next message, Vivian uses a very dry and formal tone, limiting herself to

write what is strictly necessary for the workprocess in a professional and detached way:

the usual greeting «Hi Juliano,» is replaced by a standard «Dear Juliano, » and the

closing salutation is not the common «Thank you very much», but a simple «Thanks».

Assuming that no clarifying phone call took place meanwhile, it is plausible to say that

Vivian has interpreted Juliano message as a flirting attempt to which she did not want to

reply. If this is the case, Juliano’s following message shows he understands Vivian’s

attitude and will never mention the request again. In the course of the project, Vivian

attitude will gradually turn back to the initial courteous and professional one, with some

informal touch, such as salutations in Portuguese.

I think this episode is interesting because it emphasizes the communicational

power of Vivian’s silence, which neutralizes Juliano avances by simply ignoring them.

With this silent conversational move Vivian replies in a very firm and elegant way to a

question perceived as inappropriate. Although this tactic here occurs in an asynchronous

CMC, it is very similar to the pause management everyone applies in any synchronous

vocal conversation, in which the absence of words is actually absence of sound; this

silence is very sophisticatedly modulated and dense of meaning. Moreover, no existing

software for content analysis could prove useful to interpret these silences: a human

hermeneutic process is needed.

It is still an open question to which extent a Subcontractor proved to be good

translator, but also impolite, rude or pedantic, is reused for new projects. Could him/her

be discarded for his/her relational incompetence instead of his/her translation

competence?

The following part will attempt to answer these questions.

3.3. Websurvey analysis

3.3.1. The pilot test, the websurvey submission and the response

rate.

After having built and refined the websurvey thank to some privileged testers,

such as Hilke and Igor, and with the supervision of my tutor professor, Prof. G. C.

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Bowker (of the University of California, Communication Department) I submitted a

pilot test to 20 Subcontractors, not as a an online survey yet, but as an email message

with a series of questions and options to be marked manually with an X. The results

were clear on one point: it was too long. Only 6 out of 20 people responded to my email

and only 3 of them actually completed the survey, explicitly telling me to shorten the

questionnaire by a 30-50%, since it required 25 minutes to be answered to. I thought

that the web interface would have been more motivating, because it is something fairly

new and it is easier to click here and there with the mouse than having to type an X

besides the chosen option on a “boring” email. Therefore I cut it only by a 25% and

then I submitted the final version to all 13511 VD Subcontractors. Again the response

rate was rather low: only 27% (36 responded). Why? Besides the excessive length, it

has to be said that VD did not want to invest in any kind of reward for the ones who

would answer, thus their commitment was completely voluntary and free.

Unfortunately, the software I used to build this websurvey does not have a feature to

check how many people abandoned the survey after having started to answer, thus it did

not allow some further hypothesis on the causes of such a low response rate.

One last reason may be that these Subcontractors collaborate with several

agencies simultaneously, as it is shown on the following table 12:

Table 12. ITEM: Besides VD, for how many other translation agencies are youcurrently working?

Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

0 to 2 5 14

3 to 5 6 17

6 to 8 11 31

9 to 11 1 3

12 or more 13 36

As you can see, 31 Subcontractors out of 36 work with at least 3 different agencies and

13 of them with 12 or more. It is then plausible that the motivation to comply with the

11 Actually VD Subcontractors list included 168 people, but 33 (20%) of them had obsolete email

addressed, so I could not contact them. This means that the real number of Subcontractors was muchsmaller than the potential 3000, 800, or 200 that Natasha declared to me in different occasions.

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completion request is much weaker than the one we could expect if the request was

coming from their one employer.

3.3.2. How representative are the results?

In this situation we could legitimately say that the survey of the complete

population of VD Subcontractors has become a sample survey with non-probabilistic,

voluntary sampling. This fact hinders every attempt to generalize the results to the rest

of the Subcontractors who did not respond and even less to the independent teleworkers

category. On the other hand though, a low response rate does not necessarily imply that

the sample is “not representative”, that is to say distorted: simply, we do not know

whether they are or they are not well represented by those who answered. In such cases,

the researcher can decide to stick to a very rigorous methodology and throw away the

whole set of collected data, since they are considered to be not enough representative to

allow any sort of reliable statements on the target population. Even leaving aside the

costs of such a drastic decision (in terms of resources, time, energy and frustration) I

believe there are theoretic and practical reasons that make that choice improper. In fact,

even if the gathered data are insufficient to guarantee the level of reliability the

researcher hoped for, they are definitely an interesting beginning to focus on some

topics deserving further investigations. In other words, it can be considered a more

refined pilot study for future research in this same domain. What the researcher must do

is then to question and make the reader question each result, wondering if there might

be plausible structural reasons for the results to be distorted. For example, if we

consider the question «Are you working more or less than your ideal workload?» (see

table 44) it is legitimate to suspect a data distortion since who responded had the time to

dedicate 25 minutes to answer all the questions, thus implying s/he was probably not

very busy at that moment; therefore the option «less [than the ideal workload]» might

be more frequent than the one we could expect from the whole Subcontractors

population. The major worth of these results and the correspondent hypothesis is not its

descriptive fidelity, rather their capacity to generate new, more accurate questions, thus

nurturing the scientific discussion on these themes.

Moreover, thanks to these data, I could check my initial assumptions about the

categories I used to construct the object of this study.

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This meant:

A. to check whether the group of Subcontractors who answered actually fit into the

teleworker category I indicated in the beginning (SOHOs, see § 1.2.);

B. to be sure that the relationship between them and VD is actually heavily

computer-mediated, that it generally will not include any face-to-face interaction

and that it is intercultural.

With reference to A., let us keep in mind that to the SOHOs teleworkers

category belong those:

a. who are autonomous or that at least have a large organizational autonomy in the

organization they belong to;

b. whose main workplace is home or who declare they do not have a “main

workplace”;

c. who use advanced information and telecommunication technology to

communicate with their clients and/or with their business partners.

The first point (a) is formally guaranteed by the above mentioned Subcontractor

agreement and practically proved by the previous email exchange analysis.

With regards to the workplace (b), the answer to the following question seems to

confirm the appropriateness of this categorization (table 13):

Table 13. ITEM: Where do you connect from (most of the times)?Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Home 30 83

Office 5 14

University 0 0

It varies so much that I can’t tell 0 0

Other location 1 3

As you can see, 30 out of 36 declare to connect mainly from home. This is supported by

the answers to the open-end questions as well.

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With concern to the use of advanced technologies (c), almost all respondents

affirm to be able to receive HTML formatted emails, a feature that is available only in

recent version of email software products (table 14).

Table 14. ITEM: Can you read HTML e-mails (i. e. messages containing formattedtext, pictures, clickable links and such)?

Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Yes 34 94

No 1 3

I don’t know/I’m not sure 1 3

Moreover, only 6 of them declare not to have multimedia devices available on their

computers (table 15) and a third of them had already participate to a videoconference or

had talked over the internet (table 16), a rather uncommon experience for the average

computer user.

Table 15. ITEM: What kind of multimedia devices do you have available on yourcomputer?

Count: 36/36 responded.

Option (multiple answers allowed) ƒ

Microphone 23

Full duplex audio card 18

Webcam 4

None of the above 6

Table 16. ITEM: Have you ever held a videoconference or talked over theInternet?

Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Yes 12 33

No 24 67

This sophistication level seems to be supported by a fairly good computer

expertise, that was investigated in two ways: on one hand I asked the Subcontractors to

self-assess it (table 17) and on the other hand I deduce it from other indicators, among

which the most important is the experience as Internet user (table 18):

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Table 17. ITEM: How would you define your computer expertise?Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Basic 6 17

Good 12 33

Very good 11 31

Excellent 7 19

Table 18. ITEM: How many years have you had access to the Internet?Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Less than 1 year 0 0

1 or 2 years 2 6

3 or 4 years 9 25

More than 4 years 25 69

The first table indicates that 5/6 of the respondents positively assess their

computer expertise.

The second table is particularly important if compared with what written on the

recent UCLA Internet Report (2000: 10): in this large-scale research study on American

people, the percentage for the last two categories is 39.2% (= [«2-4 years»: 23.4%] +

[«more than 4 years»: 15.8%]), whereas here they reach almost 95%.

With respect to the initial hypothesis, it still has to be checked whether the

relationship between Subcontractors and Project Managers is actually “blind”, that is to

say the two parties never see each other (table 19) and whether the work is done mainly

via email and phone (table 20-25):

Table 19. ITEM: Have you ever met him or her in person?Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Yes 6 17

No 30 83

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Question: What kind of media do you use to communicate with VD?Table 20. ITEM: EmailCount: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Most often 26 72

Often 6 17

Sometimes 2 6

Rarely 1 3

Never 1 3

Table 21. ITEM: PhoneCount: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Most often 7 19

Often 10 28

Sometimes 8 22

Rarely 8 22

Never 3 8

Table 22. ITEM: FaxCount: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Most often 0 0

Often 5 14

Sometimes 17 47

Rarely 8 22

Never 6 17

Table 23. ITEM: eFax and suchCount: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Most often 1 3

Often 3 8

Sometimes 6 17

Rarely 7 19

Never 19 53

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Table 24. ITEM: PersonCount: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Most often 0 0

Often 0 0

Sometimes 3 8

Rarely 3 8

Never 30 83

Table 25. ITEM: Regular mailCount: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Most often 0 0

Often 0 0

Sometimes 3 8

Rarely 10 28

Never 23 64

These answers do not seem to disconfirm the initial assumption on the

specificity of this professional relationship, with only 6 people reporting to have

personally met the Project Manager they worked with (table 19). These people admit

that it is unusual (table 24), accordingly with what the Project Managers declare in their

interviews. Not surprisingly, these 6 people live in the US (table 47) and presumably

not far from San Diego.

Another indicator supporting the hypothesis of a massive use of email is

represented in the following table (table 26):

Table 26. ITEM: How often do you check your working email address?Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Hourly 14 39

Several times a day 19 53

Once or twice a day 3 8

Every other day or less often 0 0

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This table is very interesting if compared with the answer to this same question

as reported in the UCLA Internet report (2000: 25): only 9% of the Americans declare

to check their email hourly — versus 39% for VD Subcontractors — and only 29% state

they check it several times a day — versus a 53% for VD respondents.

This pattern repeats itself also for that half of respondents who declared to have

a translators subnetwork they collaborate with (table 27-33):

Table 27. ITEM: Do you have a personal network of translators you collaboratewith (not necessarily other VD Subcontractors)?

Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Yes 18 50

No 18 50

Question: What kind of media do you use to communicate with them?Table 28. ITEM: EmailCount: 18/36 responded.

Option ƒ partial %

%total

Most often 13 72 36

Often 5 28 14

Sometimes 0 0 0

Rarely 0 0 0

Never 0 0 0

Table 29. ITEM: PhoneCount: 18/36 responded.

Option ƒ partial %

%total

Most often 5 28 14

Often 7 38 19

Sometimes 4 22 11

Rarely 1 6 3

Never 1 6 3

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Table 30. ITEM: FaxCount: 18/36 responded.

Option ƒ partial %

%total

Most often 1 6 3

Often 1 6 3

Sometimes 11 61 31

Rarely 5 28 14

Never 0 0 0

Table 31. ITEM: eFax and suchCount: 18/36 responded.

Option ƒ partial %

%total

Most often 0 0 0

Often 2 11 6

Sometimes 3 17 8

Rarely 1 6 3

Never 12 66 33

Table 32. ITEM: PersonCount: 18/36 responded.

Option ƒ partial %

%total

Most often 2 11 6

Often 2 11 6

Sometimes 3 17 8

Rarely 6 33 17

Never 5 28 14

Table 33. ITEM: Regular mailCount: 18/36 responded.

Option ƒ partial %

%total

Most often 0 0 0

Often 0 0 0

Sometimes 1 6 3

Rarely 9 50 25

Never 8 44 22

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If we compare this series of tables (tables 28-33) with the previous and

correspondent (tables 20-26), it is possible to recognize the same pattern in the

distribution displacement: the email is the most used communication medium, followed

by the phone, and so on until regular mail, very rarely used. This appears to bolster the

original hypothesis that this kind of working relationship, does not apply only to VD

Subcontractors, but plausibly to similar cases as well.

3.3.3. Job Advantages and Disadvantages according to VD

Subcontractors

3.3.3.1. The Advantages

The websurvey included several questions aiming to understand what the

specificities of this particular job are, according to the subs.

After some questions about their computer expertise I introduced a new section with the

following words:

Now we are going to ask you some questions about your profession as a translator: pleaseanswer in general, DO NOT refer exclusively to your working relationship with VD

The first of these questions was:

What are the advantages of your job?

The question was deliberately general in order to see how frequently the

mentioned advantages were related to the work type — teleworking — rather than

strictly connected to the translator competencies — such as linguistic skills.

Actually, the majority reports advantages related to the specific characteristics of

freelancing and teleworking, and not to the translation profession. The most frequent

“pro” to be mentioned is organizational flexibility, namely the autonomous time and

work management. Several stress the independence from a boss, the possibility to

choose the people to work with, and the freedom from office attire, as the following

answer well summarizes:

“The pros are... as a freelance, I can decide when, where and how to work, I decidewhether to accept an assignment or not, if I want to work weekends or until late atnight, there are no schedules, no office attire, and best of all: no boss!!”

The pros are…

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More tightly related to teleworking is the advantage that the workplace is one’s home.

Generally, the deliberate mobility is also recognized and appreciated, meaning that the

translator can easily travel and take his job with her/himself, by simply using a portable

computer. This kind of mobility has to be kept neatly distinct from forced mobility, like

commuting, from which the teleworker is proudly exempt («not have to sit in

traffic...»).

Sometimes, but not frequently, the possibility to stay with the family is mentioned:

“The pros are... I can work from my home at whatever time (usually, with the exceptionof tight deadlines) is convenient for me. I have a baby, so this is a major advantage, Ican work around childcare needs, appointments, etc.”

The characteristics of the translator profession are listed less frequently: i.e. the

«variety and intellectual stimulation», the passion for language interpretation, etc. As

frequently as this aspect, the good income is also cited.

Further on, another section was opened:

Let’s turn to your specific job characteristics…

“Teleworking”(i. e. working withpeople far awayfrom you, usingyour computer tocommunicate withthem)for you is more ofa:

1PersonalChoice

2 3 4 5Necessity

Can you expand on this? What do you like about “teleworking”?

...And what do you dislike or find hard to do?

With these three questions the focus on telework became explicit.

I like…

I don’t like…

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The first question aimed to introduce the topic, exploring whether there was a

tendency towards one or the other end of the scale. Here are the answers (table 34):

Table 34. “Teleworking”(…) for you is more of a:Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

1 Personal Choice 13 36

2 4 11

3 4 11

4 2 6

5 Necessity 13 36

This symmetric polarization is hard to interpret: I could not identify any

apparent connection with other questions about telework, in order to distinguish some

subgroups. Post hoc, I think this question has to be focused more sharply in order to

confront the complexity of the matter. In this case it served more as priming to drive the

respondent’s attention on telework specificities, than to identify a trend.

When surveyed directly on telework advantages, they repeated what already said in the

previous generic question, but they specified three new rather interesting aspects.

The first one is the possibility to get in touch with people from all over the world; this

aspect is very common in the everyday rhetoric of the Internet: here though, the accent

was on the multiplication of job opportunities, rather than on the charm of meeting

people from other cultures.

A second aspect is the degree of privacy allowed at home compared to the office:

“I like the fact that there is no office to go to and that I can work in my pajamas andsmoke cigarettes and I don’t have to talk with anybody or have people nosing on what Iam doing.”

The second half of this answer introduces the third aspect, which I find rather

surprising: whereas a small group complains about social isolation as a disadvantage of

this kind of job, another group cites the absence of face-to-face interaction among the

advantages of telework. The answers range from a simple «I like to be left alone» or «I

like the convenience of not needing personal contact to do the work» to a more

sophisticated:

“I like... the fact that I can do a job for someone even though I am far from theirbusiness based on their knowing about me because of the quality of my work.”

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…to an outspoken:

“I like ‘teleworking’ because it allows dealing with people around the world withoutabsolutely necessitating ‘direct personal contacts’ like meetings, telephoneconversations; the whole process can very well be totally managed through simpleemail communications and email’s attachments, which prevents all kind of personalcontact working conflicts!!!”

The complex topic of isolation will be treated thoroughly later on.

3.3.3.2. The disadvantages

In the list of disadvantages linked to the Subcontractors’ job, the top one is the

workflow variability: the workload is very unstable and the Subcontractor might have

to refuse a job because s/he is too busy at one time and few weeks later having much

less jobs than s/he wished for. This high degree of uncertainty implies very often a

difficult time management: rush projects are «often requested for yesterday, so to

speak», and even midterm plans are hard to set:

“The cons are... fluctuations in turnover: I never know if it’s just the market, orsomething I’ve done wrong! No predictable holidays, chaos in social commitments,cannot pursue any definite course of further education/skill-building, can’t go forholidays, and when I do I have to access my e-mail at least 1/2’ce a day, can’t planmajor investments (like real estate), because I am never sure how much and when I willbe paid”

This excerpt introduces the payment uncertainty problem, which is also very

frequently mentioned. Not only the common delays, but in one case the risk of not

being paid at all and the difficulty of assessing an agency trustworthiness until the first

accomplished project is paid are two factors seriously taken into account:

“The cons are that you never know how trustworthy are the new customers until theymake payments for the translated jobs done.”

We could object that this is true for everyone who provides a service to a new

client/agency, who could turn out to be insolvent. In this case though, there are three

amplifying factors:

ß first off, CMC reduces the client/agency’s exposure, so that s/he will not risk

her/his face in a direct interpersonal interaction, but it is rather a bodiless

entity, known to the Subcontractor only by written expressions or by voice;

ß secondly, even a written contract is a fairly ineffective warranty if compared

to the potential problems due to distance and transnationality in case of an

insolvent client/agency;

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ß finally, the actual market situation is unbalanced, with many Subcontractors

and few online agencies. Natasha has once said that other large translation

companies sometimes exploit the translators and do not pay them since they

know substitutes are easy to find in such a wide market offer. This lack of

warranties is underlined also by an American respondent who complains

about the absence of health insurance rules comparable to the ones the

employees benefit from. This thorny topic — trust — reappears in the

answers related to the disadvantages of teleworking:

“Payment in teleworking relationships is not as dead sure as if you’re workingin an office.”

~“I don’t like to don’t know the faces of these people.”

~“I do prefer to ‘know’ actually who is at the other end.”

How important to see the other party’s face is then? In another question I asked

those Subcontractors who declared they had never met a VD Project Manager (30/36),

if they wished to (table 35):

Table 35. ITEM: Have you ever wished to meet her/him?Count: 30/36 responded.

Option _ Partial %

%total

Yes, I’d really like to meet her/him 10 33 28

Well, sometimes I thought about it, but I canlive without it 16 53 44

No, honestly I don’t feel such a need to meether/him 4 13 11

Table 36. ITEM: Have you ever wanted to know how she/he looks like?Count: 30/36 responded.

Option _ partial %.

%total

Yes, I’d really like to see her/his face 9 30 25

Well, sometimes I thought about it, but I canlive without it 18 60 50

No, honestly I don’t feel such a need to seeher/him 3 10 8

As you can see, these two answers show how widespread is the desire to know

the person you are working with: only 4 people out of 30 deny it (table 35) and only 3

are categorical about it (table 36).

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I got in touch with Lee, the only Subcontractor I could interview, just because he

came at VD to perform an editing job he could have done at home, but as he explained

later in the interview:

LEE: I go to places like, like VD only because it’s easier uh, just to, you know, I had tomeet… I had never met… what’s her name?ME: VivianLEE: Vivian so I wanted to meet her and seeME: What person she is or…LEE: Yeah, just to find out, and that was it.ME: To see her face?LEE: Yeah, [be]’cause the voice is disconnected from the face and then I couldn’tfigure out [he laughs]

When asked why he preferred so, he answered:

ME: Is this something that happens also with other agencies or persons you work withor do you know them personally?LEE: I’ve ...most of the times I’ve met them face-to-face, it’s a lot easier to… once you,you have a face linked to the voice on the other side and read from the inflexion of thevoice what they’re saying, what their meanings are”

This is possible for Lee since he collaborates with a small network of local

colleagues. It is interesting to notice how the last answer is not very logic, since to see a

person once, has nothing to do with the capacity to interpret the paralinguistic

communication (inflexions, pauses, etc.), as this can happen over the phone as well.

Why then? What are the reasons that provoke this desire to see the other person? I

suggest that rather than the rational justifications built on the verbal-paralinguistic-

nonverbal communication rhetoric, we should look at some pre-rational reasons, such as

the fact that human beings are visual animals, which philogenetically developed a

sophisticated ability to assess a person trustworthiness on the basis of tiny little details,

that need face-to-face interaction to be detected.

If on one hand the set of collected data could lead to think that VD

Subcontractors actually feel the lack of a human image behind the name of their

interlocutors, on the other hand it is legitimate to wonder whether this trend toward

«Yes, I’d really like to see/meet him/her» is due to a self-selected sample: it cannot be

excluded that who answered the websurvey were those more sensitive to these relational

topics and therefore particularly interested to deepen the relationship with VD and its

Project Managers, more than the Subcontractors who did not answer. Definitely, further

investigation is needed.

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A last note: 5 out of 27 Subcontractors who answered the question about the

disadvantages of telework wrote «nothing I dislike».

3.3.4. Bittersweet Isolation

The goal was to investigate whether the Subcontractors were actually “loners”,

always sitting in front of their monitors, with little social life, as Natasha and Hilke had

sketched them sometimes. In order to do this I posed the following two questions:

Table 37. ITEM: Usually, when you “telework” as a translator, are you physicallyalone?

Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Yes, most of the times 29 81

No, generally not 5 14

It varies 2 6

Table 38. ITEM: Do you miss the direct interaction with other people?Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Yes, often 3 8

Well, sometimes 16 44

No, not really 17 47

The answer to the first question (table 37) seems to confirm the hypothesis that

these Subcontractors actually work in solitude (4 out of 5 in this sample).

The second set of answers (table 38) aimed to understand whether this

“physical” solitude was also felt as loneliness, and consequently mentioned as a

negative aspect of the job. The answers seem to contradict this prevision, with only 3

Subcontractors definitely admitting this negative mood, whereas 17 deny it. The

question is rather delicate, in that it is subject to social desirability: it might not be easy

to “confess” to feel lonely. In order to clarify this possibility, I added a text box where

the respondent could specify the meaning of her/his answer:

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If you would like to add something about this topic, you can do so here:

Only 10 Subcontractors answered to this invitation, but their responses are quite

interesting: in fact, in only one case we have the expected correspondence between

«Yes, often» and a specification on how unfortunate it is to work alone:

“I have been working for years closely with agencies’ Project Managers, but we knowby name and voices and have never met.”

The tone of this sentence seems to express a sort of regret, as we can perceive

from the use of “but”, an adversative conjunction. The other person who answered

«Yes, often» to the previous question and wrote something in the text box gives us an

interesting insight:

“Email lists for translators abound, this makes up somewhat for the lack of co-workers.It is better however, since usually you are not forced to collaborate with a certaingroup of people as in an office.There is a lot less negative interaction and people are more willing to share of theirknowledge, since this by no means diminishes their worth in the marketplace. In anoffice, the opposite is true.”

As we can see, the loneliness feeling is not connoted on an affective level, as a

lack of companionship. On the contrary, it is stressed how convenient it is not to have to

deal with colleagues, often perceived as unpleasant. This sort of “allergy” to co-workers

with whom they would be forced to share an office, is frequently reported by other

Subcontractors. 5 Subcontractors who answered the question in table 38 with «No, not

really» used the text box to insist on their deliberate preference for solitude:

“I like working in solitude; translation is such an opportunity.”~

“I am an introvert, and am very selective about my company.I am perfectly happy to read, listen to music, cultivate some skills, or just maybe drivearound the countryside with my wife.I don’t seem to need a ‘normal’ social life, I dislike social occasions, parties: they are awaste of time!I prefer deeper person-to-person contact but it is hard to come by, and even friends, onthe rare occasions you meet them, are really tired, actually, to really interact”

~“I enjoy a lot the freedom of teleworking from my own home office as a freelancetranslator, since I am more or less my own boss, working the way I like to work and

96

when I like to work, and putting money in my own pockets, not in my boss’s pockets.”~

“It’s nice to meet your Project Managers, go on interpreting assignments (once in awhile) but I wouldn’t like to work in an office on a steady basis.”

~“I think that this way of working makes people more efficient if they don’t needsupervision.”

In all of these testimonies, it is clear how physical solitude is considered a plus,

since there are no nosy colleagues, nor hassling supervisors or bosses.

The remaining three who added something in the text box had answered «Well,

sometimes». They report the advantages connected to the presence of co-workers, but,

once again, not on a socialization level, on a utilitarianistic one instead.

“The interaction I miss is a face-to-face discussion on difficult or new terminology.Phone calls are an intermediate solution.”

~“It’s good to have coworkers around to consult certain topics with, i.e.: the mostcorrect term in a translation, in that sense interaction is desirable.”

~“I mentioned some professional isolation earlier. Some of this is self-imposed.There are websites that allow translators to air opinions, seek different types of helpand discuss business.There is a local group of translators that meets quarterly for a potluck lunch, so thereare opportunities for interaction with other professionals. I get out to such meetingsabout half of the time.”

In this last answer the Subcontractor refers to strategies to compensate isolation,

like translators’ newsgroups and even potlucks.

Another type of isolation that someone complains about is the lack of support in

case of computer troubles:

“I don’t like the fact that if something goes wrong (e.g. can’t get online or a programsuffers a fatal error) I am helpless.”

It must be noted that this respondent declares to have a basic computer expertise

and to go directly to the professional technical support whenever a computer related

problem arises. A specific open-end question about it was:

How do you usually troubleshoot computer-related problems?

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The majority of the respondents declares that the first strategy is to attempt to

solve the problem on their own, reading the manual, re-installing the software, running

diagnostic software (i.e. Norton Utilities‰).

The second way to go is asking relatives, friends, and colleagues, known to be

experts. A few contact directly the professional technical support offered by software

companies.

Apparently, in such a small sample, who declares a basic or good computer

expertise tends to ask for help before trying to solve the problem autonomously. If this

is the case, then it is easy to understand how computer expertise becomes an important

factor determining whether isolation is perceived positively or negatively. To take

advantage of “virtual helpers”, such as newsgroups, requires to be skilled enough to get

out of the impasse first, get online and find the appropriate discussion group searching

the Internet: a set of new skills that where not part of the traditional translator’s know-

how.

3.3.5. The computer and the Internet according to VD

Subcontractors

What kind of relationship do these Subcontractors have with the technological

artifacts they use to “make a living with”? How do they feel about their computer?

How about the Internet?

To investigate the first of these topics I asked the following question:

What is the first thing that comes to your mind to describe your relationship with yourcomputer?

What is interesting about the answers to this very general question is the set of

different functions attributed to the computer. In fact, although the majority of

respondents have underlined the absolute importance of the computer as working and

communication tool («I couldn’t do my job without it» «The most important thing to my

work»), many have indicated a highly affective value:

«best friend» — «love/hate» — «I love my computer» — «Pure adoration (if I may sayso!)»

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Some others get to the point of mentioning it as a part of their body:

«Handy extension to my mind :o)» — «is part of myself» — «My right hand»

All of this could be represented by the following answer:

“It’s my life! It is absolutely central to my work, and my work is amongst my highestproperties/very high level of time allocation, so it’s a big thing in my life.”

Not everyone is so enthusiastic about it, especially those who declared a basic

computer expertise (see table 17):

“love it when it works, hate it when it doesn’t.”~

“It looks like making my work easy but I think the reality is that it is making my lifemore complicated and costing me big bucks to keep up with all the new technologicalchanges.”

It seems plausible to state that a good computer expertise is a requirement in

order to be an effective and satisfied Subcontractor.

To explore the importance of the Internet for VD Subcontractors I first asked to

estimate one’s weekly “consumption” (table 39):

Table 39. Estimated Internet consumption in a weekCount: 31/36 responded.

Question AVG. S.D.

On average, how many hours per week do you spend connected? 19.3 hrs. 28.0

Approximately, what percentage of this time is spent working as atranslator? 74% 21%

It must be noted that these values are calculated on the 31 Subcontractors who

had answered that to be a translator was either «My one and only job» or «My primary

but not only job» (Table 40).

Table 40. ITEM: To be a translator is:Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

My one and only job 23 64

My primary but not only job 8 22

My secondary job 1 3

An occasional occupation 4 11

Other 0 0

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As you can see in table 39, the average consumption is high: almost 3 hours a

day, weekend included. On the other hand, the very high standard deviation makes clear

how variable this value is in such a small sample. This is true also for the percentage of

online time spent working, but it is still remarkable that 3/4 of the time passed online is

used for professional tasks.

Besides these quantitative estimates, I wanted to understand how the Internet affected

the translators’ job, especially in comparison with the work practices before this

infrastructure had widespread worldwide.

How does the Internet affects your job as a translator?(If you were a translator before the diffusion of the Internet, we would appreciate it if youcould point out the differences on the job between now and then:-)

The answers to this questions reveal three characteristics of the Internet held as

important by the respondents:

• primarily it is a most useful research tool for translators, since it makes

available a number of resources like online dictionaries, glossaries, technical

information, etc.;

• secondly, it basically facilitates the relationship with clients from both a

practical and a communicational point of view: file transfer and

communication are much easier;

• lastly, it multiplies the job opportunities thanks to the possibility to increase

one’s visibility on the market through personal websites and resumés

databases accessible from everywhere in the “Internetized” world.

Particularly with respect to the last two points, experienced translators have

stressed the major improvements in their work practices due to the Internet:

“The differences are very important. At first, I had to save the translation on a floppydisk, call a taxi and send it to the recipient.Next, I had to send it via modem. Now, a simple e-mail allows me to receive and sendthe jobs.”

~“Receipt and delivery of the translation material is very easy using the Internet.Before the advent of the use of the Internet to deliver translations, it was mainly done

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using the fax machine, before that mail was used.All very slow and since paper copies were all you had, the translation was veryvulnerable to being lost or destroyed.I hate to even think about how it used to be!! Those were the ‘bad old days’!!”

There are differences judging how indispensable the Internet is: some

Subcontractors consider it absolutely necessary («I am a translator due to the

Internet.», «Internet is a must for freelancers (…)», «Couldn’t work without it.»)

whereas others only regard it as «a big help», but generally it is widely recognized that

Internet provoked a real revolution in the job of these professionals and in their

lifestyles as well:

“It makes all the difference in the world!!”~

“The Internet has changed the profession upside down.”~

“A major shift in lifestyle”

The only negative aspects of the Internet are related to the dubious reliability of

certain information and to the broad skill expansion that it requires, as explained above.

3.3.6. Time Management

The email exchange analysis between Florence and Lucio has shown the time

extension due mainly to the irremovable time zone difference and less to the scarce

Subcontractor’s solicitude.

The only way to bypass this problem is to flexibilize the working hours of the

interlocutors — as a matter of fact, the Subcontractor’s ones.

When asked about possible problems intervening in the workprocess, two

Subcontractors complain about this time zone difference:

“ Sometimes the time zone difference is also a problem, as you have a question and youwould like to know the answer but you have to wait for the project manager to come inat the office, which will only happen when it’s almost the end of the day in your part ofthe globe.”

~“Many phone calls, late evening for me because of the time difference, and not alwaysmeaningful”

In theory this flexibiliziation does not necessarily imply more working hours,

since the Subcontractor is free to manage her/his day and to reserve some time to

dispatch personal errands even within the classical office hours (8:30-18:30).

Nonetheless, literature on telework (Pratt, 1999; Shafizadeh and coll., 1997) generally

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states that an actual working time extension is common among teleworkers. The

comparison though is made with the working hours for peer colleagues staying in the

office. Instead, VD Subcontractors are autonomous workers, and therefore these

comparisons do not fit. It is then sensible to narrow down the problem to the subjective

time management style of each Subcontractor. With respect to this point, VD

respondents answered as follows (table 41):

Table 41. Self-estimated weekly workload.Count: 31/36 responded.12

Question AVG. S.D.

How many hours a week, on average, do you spend working astranslator? 42.7 hrs. 17.3

Approximately what percentage of this time is spent using your computer? 91% 16%

Whether to judge the weekly workload as heavy or light is a matter of reference

points: if we compare it with the 36-38 hours established by the unions for some

workers categories, it might be heavy; but if we compare it with craftsman or managers

working hours, then it is rather light. The high standard deviation is certainly due to the

small number of respondents, but it tendentially supports the hypothesis that the

workload is largely dependent on every single Subcontractor’s conditions, as it is

backed up by the following table (43):

Table 42. ITEM: Do you work during weekends?Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Yes, most of the times 18 50

Sometimes 13 36

No, only exceptionally 5 14

This table shows that 31 out 36 respondents say they work during weekend at

least sometimes.

Interestingly, to work outside the regular office hours is not necessarily

perceived as a problem or hassle:

12 Like before, the indicators are calculated on the 31 Subcontractors who declared that being a translator

is their primary job (see table 40).

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Table 43. ITEM: During which hours do you prefer to work?Count: 36/36 responded.

Option (multiple answers were possible) ƒ

Very early in the morning (around 5am to 9am) 6

During the traditional office hours (around 9am to 5pm)13 15

During late afternoon/evening/night (from 5pm on) 8

None of the above/I don’t have a specific preference 12

In apparent contradiction with these data, the traditional office hours are not the

most wanted: in fact, 3 out of 15 who chose that time span marked another option as

well. This means that only 12 people expressed an exclusive preference for the regular

hours, whereas the remaining (24) have declared to prefer other time ranges or to have

no preference at all14.

Autonomous time management is mentioned among the advantages of being a freelance

teleworker also in the open-end questions:

“The pros are working on your own, at your own pace, either duringday/evening/night/weekend shifts and you can deal with customers (...indirect boss...)anywhere around the world.”

At last, in the following table you can see the respondents’ assessment of their

own workload (Table 44):

Table 44. ITEM: Are you currently working more or less than your DESIREDworkload?

Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

More 13 36

Less 10 28

The desired amount 13 36

As noted above, this data may be distorted, with a higher frequency for the «Less»

option.

13 Previously I referred to the 8:30-18:30 hours as the "traditional office hours". The discrepancy with the

9 to 5 range is due to the fact that "9 to 5" in the US has become an idiomatic expression to indicateworking hours, even if ever less respected as such. The 8:30-18:30 aims to represent the office hours ina more realistic and flexible way, including those extra hours that become ever more common.

14 Indeed the total is 41 (=6+15+8+12), and not 36, since multiple answers were allowed: 5 peoplemarked two options.

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An extra difficulty is due to the unstable workload that makes it hard to answer “once

and for all”, so to speak. Further investigation is definitely needed.

This unpredictable workload reflects itself in a difficult “threshold

administration” between working life and private life; this is the most frequently cited

disadvantage directly associated to teleworking:

“I don’t like... the difficulty of closing down the computer once started on a job, saying‘let’s call it a day’, taking quality time off my family”

In one case the Subcontractor admits that the office constraints help out on this

point:

“Staying motivated can sometimes take more effort than in an office setting, but onbalance, I prefer to work at home.”

But once more he repeats his preference for a home office.

Summarizing, time management appears in the answers of all four questions

about advantages and disadvantages of both the translator’s profession and teleworking;

as it turned out for isolation, Subcontractors mention both its positive and negative

aspects: the possibility to manage one’s own time is appreciated, but the difficulty of

doing it well, balancing work and private life, is also recognized.

3.3.7. Different set of values that VD Project Managers and

Subcontractors declare to use to evaluate their counterpart

Another topic to explore was the set of values used by the Project Managers and

the Subcontractors in order to judge their collaboration quality.

To look into this matter, I referred to two information sources:

• the Subcontractors answers to a dedicated part of the websurvey;

• the Project Managers interviews.

Eventually, a comparison was made between the two.

Subcontractors were asked to evaluate the importance of certain values on an

ordinal 5 points scale, form «Most important» to «Least important».

The suggested values have been chosen after having studied the workprocess in

its details and have been tested by the VD staff and the pilot testers. Moreover, the

respondents were left the possibility to write an extra value, not included in the

proposed list.

The question was phrased as it follows:

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Generally speaking, what do you consider most important when working with a translationagency?

8 Likert scales followed (see attachment 2):

Translation rates Mostimportant

Veryimportant

Fairlyimportant

Lessimportant

Leastimportant

The other suggested values were, in this order:

• reliability in payments

• clarity of the assignments;

• availability for questions;

• interpersonal relationship with the agency’s people;

• punctuality in payments;

• loyalty to you;

• professionalism.

!!!!!!!!Analyzing the answers distributions, the following graphic was plotted15 (Fig. 6):

15 Lines have been rounded in order to ease the graph readability. To check the answers to the single

variables, please refer to attachment 4 in the appendix.

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Values according to subcontractors

0

7

14

21

Most important Very important Fairly important Less important Least important

Translation rates Reliability in paymentsClarity of the assignments Availability for questionsInterpersonal relationship with agency's people Punctuality in paymentsLoyalty to you Professionalism

Fig. 6. Frequency distribution for the answers to the question:Generally speaking, what do you consider most important when working with a translation agency?

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106

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The chart shows how answers concentrate around the scale left end, attributing a

high importance to almost all the suggested values. It is then difficult to establish a clear

priority order, but it looks sensible to distinguish the options in two groups depending

on the frequency of the top option «Most important»16 (the two groups are marked with

different line thickness). Doing so we could say that reliability in payments is the top

value for the majority of the respondents, followed by professionalism, clarity of the

assignments and punctuality in payments.

Once again, these data confirm what noted above with regard to the high degree

of uncertainty connected to this job, for both clients’ trustworthiness (reliability in

payments) and the fluctuations in workload (punctuality in payments). Among the

problems they encounter working with VD, the payments delays are the most

commonly contested (see attachment 4).

Professionalism is an “umbrella-term”, that to some extent summarizes the

personal configuration of values used as reference system for an overall assessment of

the collaboration occurred. This value was inserted since a pilot tester suggested it, but

post hoc it turned out to be rather tautological and scarcely distinctive.

The importance given to the clarity of the assignments could be connected to

two factors:

• the constraints imposed by mediated communication — both phone and

email;

• the lesser Project Managers’ accessibility if compared to someone being

physically present in your own office.

This hypothesis is controversial, since the majority of the respondents (14 + 17 =

31) deny they will give up and not contact their Project Managers only because of

mediated communication constraints:

16 For the reasons already explained in the previous § 3.3.2 I did not verify whether this intuitive

distinction is statistically significant.

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Table 45. ITEM: How often do you wish you could talk or quickly ask something tothe Project Manager, but you give up because the communication constraints

make the effort not worthwhile?Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Most often 1 3

Often 1 3

Sometimes 3 8

Rarely 17 47

Never 14 39

On the other hand though, it seems to be backed up by the high frequency of answers

choosing «Very important» for availability for questions (see fig. 6), as it emerges from

the email exchange analysis as well.

Table 45 could then be explained as a distorted sample effect, since those who decided

NOT to respond to the websurvey might be the most inclined to give up because of

communication constraints.

Once again, further investigation should be carried through.

It is also interesting to see how translation rates is considered to be «Very

important» by the majority of respondents (21), but is much less frequently indicated as

«Most important» (7).

Quite surprisingly to me, the interpersonal relationship is held as scarcely

important. This data opens up a wide range of questions about how the respondents

mean with the expression «interpersonal relationship»: it might be plausible that they

think of it as something more direct, less mediated and not tightly linked to the work.

Since this is not the kind of relationship that Subcontractors have with their Project

Managers, it is sensible that the interpersonal relationship is considered not pertinent

and therefore less important.

Another possible explanation arises from the Project Managers interviews, and is

related to a certain “rhetoric of competence”, according to which the judgment on the

quality of an accomplished assignment cannot be influenced by subjective feelings,

such as liking or disliking someone’s attitude:

“ME: Was there any episode in which you really started with a translator and then youthought that the relationship was not going anywhere and even if the translator wasgood in quality, you just decided that he was not good enough to be used again?

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HILKE: NO, because a personal relationship is something different from a businessrelationship, and if somebody is doing a good job, on time at a reasonable price, itdoesn’t matter if I like that person or not”.

Elsewhere in the interview though, in two occasions in which quite the same

question was asked in a less stereotypical way, Hilke answered differently:

“ME: How would you intertwine the social or interpersonal relationship between you,so the Project Manager, and the Subcontractors… how... let’s say powerful orinfluential the good or bad relationship, just, really on a personal level, can be for thefinal result?HILKE: Actually I think that the Project Manager has to be fairly diplomatic and try tomaintain a good relationship with the Subcontractor, because with a bad relationshipyou cannot expect any good results.”

To a close view, in this passage we can detect an “automatic” attempt to collude

with the interviewer: Hilke seems to interpret the question as an expression of the

interviewer’s expectation that she will confirm the major importance of interpersonal

relationship, and she answers accordingly.

It is further on that Hilke expresses what I believe to be her most sincere and

reliable evaluation about this matter; when asked about the criteria she uses to keep

track of the quality of the Subcontractors she had worked with, she declared:

“HILKE: So, me for myself, the people I worked with… I kept a good memory of who Iliked and who I didn’t like, how I felt the thing worked well together.”

In this last question the dialogue focus was not explicitly on interpersonal

relationship, rather on recording and “data basing” practices, thus Hilke’s effort to be a

“collaborative interviewee” is addressed to satisfy the interviewer’s expectations on this

topic. What she implicitly affirms with respect to the interpersonal relationship

importance can reasonably be free from collusion attempts and consequently sincere.

Here Hilke does not say: «I remember those who worked well, delivering a high quality

translation, within the established deadlines, at a reasonable rate»; instead, she refers

to an emotional judgement criteria: «...who I liked and who I didn’t like (...) how I felt

the thing worked well together».

Florence, in her interview, tells an episode that is meaningfully related to this

point:

“ME: Did you ever come across some translators that were hard to handle from arelationship point of view?FLORENCE: Yeah, I did.ME: Can you tell me more about it?FLORENCE: Uh, I think he was somebody that was just way too busy and he didn’t

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communicate at all well and he didn’t read my emails properly: he just saw them quickand so he did the wrong things… because it took only 5 minutes to read the coversheetand the instructions and I was trying get back to him, you know, about a problem, andhe was just.. he had made me feel bad for disturbing him, I tell you: it was really awful!ME: So you generally work once and you stop with a person like that?FLORENCE: Yeah, I haven’t used him for months and… I mean, he’s a goodtranslator, but if doesn’t read the emails, than is not gonna do the right jobs, that’s thepoint.”

This excerpt backs up once more the importance of a good interpersonal relationship as

a prerequisite for a good professional relationship; Florence words when she describes

her emotional reaction are pretty strong: «...he had made me feel bad for disturbing him,

I tell you, it was really awful!». The fact that she holds him as a good translator it is not

enough: he must be a good communicator as well.

Florence confirms this conclusion in other parts of the interview: the characteristics of a

good Subcontractor are basically 3, in the following order:

1. to be a high quality translator;

2. to be a good communicator (meaning prompt answering and sending

feedback when asked to);

3. to be reliable with respect to the deadlines.

Hilke’s identikit does not differ much from Florence’s, but adds accessibility as

supplementary characteristic:

“ME: What are the characteristics of a good Subcontractor, in order, for you?HILKE: Uh, the characteristics of any good freelance worker, which are: goodcommunication skills, accessibility, reliability, and it doesn’t matter if he or she is slow,so long that they send it [the job] every time they’ve said they would send it.”

Vivian does not explicitly mention communication skills, confirms the

importance of a good specialized preparation in the subject, but brings up honesty as

follows:

“VIVIAN: He has to be honest, frank, responsible for deadlines: since you don’t knowthe person you’re working with through the project, he has to be honest, do not changethe price amidway.(…) Since you’re not working in the same building you have to be honest.”

The last sentence is particularly interesting, since apparently it subordinates honesty to

the physical presence of the two interlocutors. A more sensible interpretation is that

being together in an office ensures a tighter control and reduces the possibility to lie

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about one’s capacity to accomplish the assignment. Once again it is about trust and the

difficulty to give confidence across a distance, without face-to-face interaction.

This hypothesis holds with the technological and management literature about

virtual teams (Lipnack, Stamps, 1997; Warkentin, Sayeed, Hightower, 1997) that

stresses the importance of regular face-to-face meetings to build up reciprocal trust and

consequently an effective collaboration.

The last comparison to be made is between the websurvey results and the

answers given to the same questionnaire by the Project Managers, pretending to answer

like the “average Subcontractor”.

Overall, the Project Managers show a surprisingly accurate image of the

Subcontractors’ characteristics and of the problems they contest to VD. The only

discrepancy refers to the values scale: Vivian tends to overestimate the importance of

translation rates and underestimate the importance of the clarity of the assignments.

Florence and Hilke are impressively close to the results obtained with this sample of

Subcontractors.

Generally speaking, the image of the sub as a “loner” has been only partially

confirmed, with the necessary specification that working alone does not imply feeling

lonely.

3.3.8. Computer Mediated Interculturality

As we said in the beginning, one major target for this study was the relationship

between CMC and cultural background. The goal was not a classification of different

cultures, identifying a definite set of cultural invariants, as quantitative cross-cultural

research often attempts to do (Hofstede, 1984).

On the contrary, the focus was on the influence that the communication medium

used, email, could have in establishing and maintaining a relationship between people

of a deeply diverse cultural inheritance. Indeed, this heritage becomes much less visible

during CMC, since the only indicators that remain evident are nationality, sometimes

the residence and the name, and eventually the languages one speaks. On the basis of

these symbolic cues the interlocutors may build a prototypical image of the other party,

that is to say strongly influenced by the stereotypes related to the category in which we

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include our interlocutor (Riva, 2000: 213). Stereotypes main function is to reduce

uncertainty embedded in every human interaction by facilitating the search for a

common script (Shank, Abelson, 1977) that could guarantee a fluid interaction. In case

of a great cultural distance, stereotypes can be very rough and generic, on a continental

level, so to speak: Asian, Latin, European, etc. In all these occurrences the natural

tendency seems to be to fill up the gaps of our meagre prototypical images “lending our

obvious to them”, that is to say implicitly assuming that what is obvious for us is very

likely to be obvious for them (Lea, Spears, 1991). And of course this is not always true.

In fact, even in the open-end question about teleworking inconveniencies, a couple of

Subcontractors complained about some limits of email communication:

“I don’t like… it because sometimes it creates a misunderstanding whencommunicating via e-mails.”

~“I don’t like... telecommunications itches, long waits, having to convince people of apoint of view”

It could be fortuitous, but these two answers are from Subcontractors belonging to a

culture very different form the American one: one is Thai and the other is Indian.

Then you may wonder: How often are these stereotypes contradicted by

practice? And if they are contradicted, what happens? Misunderstandings? Culture

shocks?

In order to answer these questions, besides the interviews and email exchange

analysis mentioned before, I prepared a section of the websurvey devoted only to this.

In this part respondents were asked about their nationality (table 46), their residence

(table 47), the number of languages they speak (table 48) and their experience abroad

(table 49).

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Table 46. ITEM. What is/are your nationality/nationalities?Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

US 9 25

Canadian from the Province of Quebec (FrenchCanadian mother tongue) 1 3

Mexican 1 3

Brazilian 1 3

Argentine 3 8

Italian 1 3

Romanian 1 3

French 3 8

Senegalese 1 3

French/Canadian 2 6

U.S. citizen/Mexican citizen 1 3

British 1 3

US and Polish 1 3

US citizen, native of Finland, actively pursuing dualcitizenship 1 3

Brazilian / Portuguese 1 3

Brazilian/Spanish 1 3

Japanese 1 3

Cuban 1 3

Spanish 1 3

Thai 1 3

US citizen with Korean origin 1 3

German 1 3

Indian 1 3

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Table 47. ITEM: In which country do you currently live? (Please for United Stateswrite US)

Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

US 21 58

Canada 3 8

Mexico 1 3

Argentina 3 8

Italy 1 3

United Kingdom! 2 6

France 2 6

Brazil 2 6

India 1 3

These two questions aimed to verify the actual cultural variety of the subs, as

initially hypothesized. It is surely interesting the fact that amongst the 36 respondents as

many as 20 nationalities are represented and 7 people have double citizenship;

moreover they live in 9 different countries.

Table 48. ITEM: How many languages do you fluently speak (your mother tongueincluded)?

Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

2 24 67

3 9 25

4 3 8

Table 49. ITEM: Are you currently living or have you ever lived in a countrydifferent from your homeland for a period equal or longer than 6 months?

Count: 36/36 responded.

Option ƒ %total

Yes 30 83

No 6 17

This pair of questions was meant to verify whether there was an actual experience of

cultural contexts different from one’s own, assuming polyglotism and life abroad as

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indicators. As you can see, 1 out of 4 speaks 3 languages, and just 1 out of 6 has never

lived abroad for at least 6 months.

At this point the following open-end question was asked:

Stop and reflect for a second: could you tell us about some “culture shocks” youpersonally experienced when dealing with people from a different culture?(Episodes in which you thought: “Darn, I can’t believe people can think in such adifferent way!”)

Unfortunately, only a few answered (18) and mostly wrote about some episodes in

which they compared their own culture with another one (while traveling, visiting

foreign countries, etc.) but rarely in the professional domain. In one case there was

such a reference to the job practice: an American Subcontractor living in the US

passionately describes her professional relationship with Latin American clients:

“The worse thing about being a Spanish to English translator is that documents fromLatin America generally come in a hard copy form. Usually a fax of a fax of a fax.These documents have clearly been created in MS Word, but the client just can’t bear topart with the electronic file. I find this infathomable. I cannot understand thisreasoning and it makes the job of the translator very difficult and for no good reason. Ialso do not understand why it seems that Latin Americans will promise you the moon,as they never want to say no to you and then do whatever they please, disregardingtheir promises to you.”

I consider this testimony particularly fascinating because it expresses clearly the

“hassle” associated to incomprehension, the difficulty of understanding the logic

underlying another culture. With regard to the first complaint — the excessive use of

fax — in a subsequent communication I had with this Subcontractor, she excluded that

this behavior could derive from a scarce diffusion of the Internet in Latin America, and

suggested the following interpretation instead:

“I think it is because there is a mistaken idea that if they give you an electronic file youwill in some way take away their ownership of that file.(…) however, slowly but surely it is getting better.”

It is hard to judge whether this explanation is correct, but it certainly recalls similar

examples in which there was a passage from a material system to a more virtual one.

Simply think about the passage from gold coins to paper banknotes, only nominally

valuable; and then the following step, form bills to credit cards. Beyond the material

Oh yes, like that time…

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infrastructural constraints, we can imagine something like a cultural inertia that has to

be gradually overcome so that new practices can spread widely, conquering people’s

trust. In this case we could argue that the point is not «ownership», but instead the risk

of forgery, perceived as higher for a file — that is inherently modifiable — than for a

fax — that is not.

Overall, the other answers did not give me any further insight in order to address

the matter in a more specific way. Nevertheless, the websurvey had another optional

question on this topic:

(Optional question) How do YOU see the relationship between your culturalbackground and the communication via computer (email and such...)? How doyou think they influence each other?

The question is fairly complicate and engaging, above all because it is the last one of the

whole questionnaire. Not surprisingly then, only 16 responded, and not always

pertinently.

The most recurrent stance is well represented below:

“There is no particular effect of computers in my cultural background.. It is just a toolto develop skills I already have.”

In other words, CMC is viewed as merely instrumental, neutral with respect to contents:

“I think that email styles reflect cultural styles. People from warmer, more personablecultures tend to write more flowery and personal emails. People from emotionalcultures tend to write emotional emails.

This idea that writing styles reflect cultural styles, is expanded by another

Subcontractor, a Cuban woman:

“When I write e mails I watch myself carefully so as not to write too much, as I tend tobe talkative and to say too many things because of my cultural, Caribbeanbackground.”

She confirms there is an actual tendency to maintain one’s own cultural specificities

even via email, but she admits she controls herself carefully, so she adapts her style. To

what? To a literary genre, supposedly the “email genre”, typically concise, or to her

interlocutors’ culture, namely American customs, since she lives in the US? In a

subsequent communication we had, she answers:

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“Often a letter to my friends in Cuba or Spain (or even to my Latino friends in theStates) contains at least two paragraphs, while a letter to my American friends is just ashort paragraph or a few lines.”

Form this excerpt, one could infer that one’s interlocutors’ culture — friends, not co-

workers — takes over the “email genre” — if it exists. At this point it would be really

interesting to further investigate whether this is an isolated case or a common

occurrence in these intercultural circumstances.

Another subgroup could be named “the Internet enthusiasts”:

“It is now possible to communicate with others more intimately, yet on a less personalbasis. As I said earlier, having a presence on the Internet makes both translators andagencies feel more comfortable without their ever having met. For me this has made itpossible to foster professional relationships more easily than 10 years ago. With thegreater diffusion of teleconferencing etc., it seems as though this trend will continueuntil a flesh-and-blood, face-to-face meeting becomes moot. Culturally, I’m not surewhat that means, but it is good news as a freelancing professional.”

Here the respondent interestingly distinguishes between intimacy and personal

presence, implicitly denying that CMC might hinder such intimacy. In succession, he

confirms how positive the Internet and its development are, in a time span that reaches

into a future where videoconferencing progress will question the very convenience of

face-to-face meetings. At last, saying «Culturally, I’m not sure what that means», he

seems to argue that culture has not much to do with all this trend he just illustrated: the

main thing is that it is positive for freelancing. Through another respondent answer we

can realize what are the limits of such a conception of culture:

“I assume that my cultural background has had at least a little to do with my belief inthe advantages of computer-based work.”

This is the one and only answer in which reflection upon oneself leads to a conception

of culture that goes beyond the simplistic folklore+traditions+customs formula, like in

this response:

«The Internet allows me to keep a regular contact with my cultural background thanksto French Web sites that I can visit regularly»

Culture is this and much more than this: it pervades everyone’s life, conditioning our

beliefs. This invisible presence is well represented by Cole’s and Mantovani’s

metaphors (Cole, 1996; Mantovani, 1998: 5-6). The former compares culture to the

water for a fish:

118

“Like fish in water we fail to see culture because is the medium within which we exist”

The latter tells an Indian tale: cercare citazione originale inglese sul libro di mantovani

“(…) a big elephant was in front of a wise man immersed in meditation. The wise manlooks at it and says: «This is not an elephant». A little later, the elephant turns aroundand slowly goes away. At this point the wise man wonders whether by any chance thereis an elephant nearby. At last, the elephant is gone. When it is definitely out of sight, thewise man sees the footprints it has left and with certainty declares: «Here there was anelephant».(…)The meaning we give to this tale is that the elephant, like the cultural dimension, isreally invisible if you do not know what to look at, while is becomes overhanging like amountain filling up the horizon if we only know what we have to look at.

With respect to this story, we could compare the author of the previous response

to the wise man who wonders whether an elephant might be around, that is to say that

he suspects that his own beliefs are — at least partly — the result of his cultural

background.

The last noticeable response with regard to this topic is the following:

“I enjoy it [the relationship between CMC and cultural background] immensely, butmore importantly, it’s a great leveller, it connects people through a common culturalcurrency, albeit a currency spread by words and images on a screen: for example, goodwork earns respect everywhere. In this way, work has become an important commonmeeting ground for people from different cultures and colours and races, and thatcomputer-mediated communication is important to start, spread, and sustain a growingglobal unity through the sharing of everyday things like work, chatting, conversation,the exchange of news, interesting tit bits, jokes, whatever you think important. I think itgives basic humanity a chance, I welcome this and thank God for it.”

I consider to be worth analyzing this response, since it represents the other front

of the “Internet enthusiasts party”: while the previous respondent was imagining such

an extraordinary CMC development to moot the opportunity of face-to-face meetings —

a stance that I called “technological progress cheerleader” — this Subcontractor

represents another optimistic stance, that belongs to the rhetoric of the Internet as the

«great leveller», namely what will finally make everyone equal and spread democracy

(Spoull, Kiesler, 1986).

The vision he suggests is entirely positive: he recognizes the positive value of the

possibility to communicate with other cultures, but there is no reflection upon the risk

of a cultural homogenization deriving from the use of communication standards

universally adopted. We find again, implicitly expressed, the idea of the Internet as a

119

mere tool, and therefore neutral with respect to contents. This sort of “common cultural

currency” implies to force one’s own cultural expression through a set of very unnatural

input devices — such as a keyboard — and output devices — such a few inches wide,

square monitor — that do not have absolutely any citizenship in most of the existing

cultures. All this does not even touch on this Subcontractor’s enthusiastic thoughts. Nor

is there any awareness about the so-called digital divide, namely the division of

humanity between those who have and those who have not access to the technological

infrastructure underlying the Internet. But perhaps, the most surprising thing is the fact

that this respondent is not an American, well accustomed to live in the technologically

most advanced country worldwide, but an Indian, living in India: to me this has been a

culture shock, since it shatters my stereotypes about that country.

120

121

Conclusion

3.4. Meta-analysis

“Chopping” the title of this thesis — To Collaborate without Seeing Each Other:

Telework in a Trasnational Virtual Organization — in its elements we can try to draw

up a balance of this research study.

«Collaborating…»

With concern to this aspect, it has been better outlined a form of cooperative

interaction that presents some specificities: it is a collaboration mediated by

technological artifacts, very task-oriented, but nonetheless it requires a good

interpersonal relationship to work smoothly.

As in any other social interaction — maybe except war — there are rules to respect so

that both parties may benefit from it. They are the negotiation rules we uncovered

through the email exchange analysis: one for all, the necessity to give always feedback

in order to reinforce the workprocess, and the professional and interpersonal

relationship along with it.

«…without seeing each other:»

The consequences of such a collaborative relationship turned out to be quite

chiaroscuro: having no face-to-face interaction is perceived as something missing by a

few, whereas several declare to appreciate this particular aspect.

«Telework…»

A similar ambivalence emerges also from the analysis of the Subcontractors

answers to the online questionnaire, above all with respect to organizational

independence and isolation. The major negative aspects for the first one are related

mainly to time management: the troubles of administering a fluctuant workload on one

hand and the difficulty to balance professional and private life on the other.

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With concern to isolation, far from declaring to suffer from it, VD Subcontractors claim

this as a deliberate choice. A few miss some colleagues — on the contrary! — and those

who say it, connote this absence instrumentally — namely, professional support — not

affectively.

«... in a transnational …»

This point is the most fascinating to me, in that it is so hard to grasp. It is this

tension between global homogenization on one side — due to the CMC format

constraints (mouse, keyboard, monitor, US software, etc.) — and the multiplication of

local voices on the other17, that to me represents the most intriguing challenge in this

field: what has been referred to as the glocalization phenomenon .

Neither the websurvey nor the email exchange analysis succeeded in giving some

remarkable insights to solve the mystery for which, despite the communicational

poverty of email, people with very different cultural background manage to interact so

smoothly and effectively that it is hard to recognize any major itches.

«…Virtual Organization »

This aspect is quite important for work and organization psychology, for it is

reasonable to foresee that these new forms of organization will spread along with the

ever-increasing diffusion of the Internet worldwide and flexibilization of job market.

Obviously, VD case cannot be considered paradigmatic, but it is indeed a first

exploration attempt.

[It goes without saying that this thesis is made of two parts: the one I wrote and the one

I have not written, and the latter is the most important one.]

17 The most recent estimate I could retrieve (August 2001) says there are 513 million Internet users

worldwide (source: http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index.html), very unequallydistributed.

123

3.5. Relevant aspects of the VD-Subcontractors relationship not considered

in this study

Beyond the goals of this particular study, there are some aspects that I reckon

deserving further investigation.

First off, a work relationship configured in these terms poses a whole set of questions

about teleworkers protection with respect to labor rights and trade unions.

During the month of May 2000 I had the chance to participate to a 2 days

conference organized by the Institute For The Future (http://www.iftf.org), a research

institute located in Palo Alto that builds future scenarios for large corporations. While

there, I attended a workshop in which a group of international experts belonging to the

major telecommunications (TLC) corporations (Ericsson, Deutsche Telekom, Kpn,

Intel, AT&T) were discussing about the most likely developments of the business world

once the TLC technologies will have solved the actual technical problems in terms of

bandwidth, standards and communication protocols, wireless penetration, etc. The

following scenario was sketched:

“The increased independence from a precise geographic location, together with a moregeneral flexibilization of work, should lead to a widespread work autonomization, thatis to say a springing up of freelance professionals. These subjects, working with severalcompanies simultaneously will compensate the lack of identification typical ofdependent employees, building up consortia recalling middle age guilds. Differentlyfrom those, that were local, these will be transnational, and therefore hardly insertablein a specific juridical order, since they will require a counterpart with similarcharacteristics of virtualness and transnationality. Thus in this domain we foresee thesame legal problem we are dealing with nowadays in the e-commerce juridicalregulation, in which national laws wear thin and crack under the globalizationpressure.

This was produced by a Delphi group, that is a little group of experts in a

specific domain, and therefore is based on individual perceptions more than on

statistical analysis. Nevertheless, it is striking how this scenario for VD is anything, but

future.

There is a revolution in the conception of distance: from geographic to mediatic.

The perception of a positive correlation between geographical distance and accessibility

is not true anymore, but there still is a strong cultural inertia to overcome. For example,

nowadays, to call Hawaii from Paris is as cheap as calling London, and is often much

cheaper than calling the neighbor’s cellular phone. Nonetheless, people awareness about

124

this fact is still very limited, because they are still reckoning about geographic distance

to estimate cost: the closer, the cheaper and vice versa. Instead and ever more, it is the

communication infrastructure availability that determines the meaning of “far” and

“close”.

Another aspect, traditionally associated with telework and disregarded in this

study, is the impact of this form of telework on traffic and connected domains, like

pollution and urbanization.

Eventually, the study of life style changes due to such a pervading use of TLC

technologies surely deserves a deeper look: I refer to the blurred distinction between

professional and private life, with a specific focus on teleworking mothers, here

completely absent.

125

Appendix

Attachment 1. Email message inviting to participate to the websurvey.

Subject: VD Survey 2000Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 21:55:06 +0100From: Survey <survey@VD.com>Reply-To: paolo@VD.comOrganization: VD, Inc.To: survey@VD.comBCC: <all Subcontractors’ email addresses>

Hello Dear Collaborator,

I would like to introduce you to Paolo Brunello who is helping us to establish a flawlesscommunication with you and with your colleague translators working with us from all overthe world.Paolo is a graduate student from Italy, performing a research study at VD (formerlySputnik Translation Services). He is writing to you for the following reasons:1. He is in the process of writing a thesis on the subject of “The collaboration throughcomputer mediated communication in a Virtual Organization”.2. VD realized that this research was extremely relevant to the improvement of ourcollaborative working practices: we realize that we do not know much about you and yourworking conditions, and we would like to expand our knowledge in order to improve ourrelationship with you as a collaborating Subcontractor.

This is the first scientific research project specifically focused on freelance teleworkingtranslators.

To do this, we have prepared an online survey that uses a web interface, which will makeeverything as user-friendly and quick as possible.

We plan to process your answers next Monday, but if you could fill this questionnairesooner, it will be mostappreciated.

REMEMBER, ALL THE INFORMATION YOU WILL PROVIDE US WITH WILL BESTRICTLYCONFIDENTIAL AND WILL BE ANALYZED COLLECTIVELY AS AGGREGATE:IT WILL NOT BEASSOCIATED TO YOUR NAME AS A SPECIFIC RESPONDENT (In OTHERWORDS IT IS

126

WORDS IT ISANONYMOUS).

As you can see, your address does not appear in the heading to protect your privacy withregards to the otherrecipients of this message.

Immediately after you complete the online questionnaire, you will be able to see the resultscollected so far.

You can decide to skip certain questions if you don’t feel comfortable answering them, butwe would heartilyappreciate your effort to answer.

IF YOU DECIDE NOT TO ANSWER THE ONLINE QUESTIONNAIRE AT ALL ORTO QUIT IT BEFOREFINISHING, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE TELL US WHY BY REPLYING TO THISEMAIL.

IF, WHILE ANSWERING, YOU ENCOUNTER ANY TECHNICAL PROBLEM, WEENCOURAGE YOU TO REPORT IT BY REPLYING TO THIS EMAIL.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Natasha <last name>General ManagerVD, Inc.www.VD.com

Paolo BrunelloIntern at VD, Inc.Exchange Graduate StudentCommunication Dept., University of California, San DiegoandWork and Organization Psychology Dept., University of Padova

OK, TO GO TO THE WEB SURVEY, SIMPLY CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING LINK:http://or.psychology.dal.ca/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~wcs/SAprojects/brunus/VD.pl

(if your email program does not support clickable links, simply cut and paste the link intoyour browser)

Thank you again!

127

Attachment 2. Websurvey.

<IMAGE: LOGO VD>

Welcome!

Answering the following questions should require anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes, depending on youranswers, BUT MUST BE DONE ALL AT ONCE FOR THE DATA TO BE VALID. You cannot createa bookmark/favorite, nor save the answers.

Please, DO NOT click on the back button of your browser — unless it’s specifically requested: if you doso, your answers will be invalid. (For the same reason, all links to our website have been disabled, butyou will be able to access our home page from the last page of the questionnaire).

Remember: skip is better than quit, so if you really don’t feel like answering, some questions can beskipped, but please don’t quit the survey: Not only will you miss the chance to participate in the firstresearch project on teleworking freelance translators but you will also miss an opportunity to see —immediately after submitting the questionnaire — how your colleagues all over the world have answeredso far!

To start off smoothly, we are going to ask you some simple questions about your computer equipment.

Ready?

GO!As a translator, how many computers do you use?

1

2 or moreIf your answer is “2 or more” PLEASE CHOOSE THE ONE YOU USE MOST OF THE TIMES, ANDREFER ONLY TO THAT ONE WHILE ANSWERING THE WHOLE QUESTIONNAIREHow many years have you had access to the Internet?

Less than 1 year

1 or 2 years

3 or 4 years

More than 4 years

Where do you connect from (most of the times)?Home

OfficeUniversity

It varies so much that I can’t tell

Other location

On average, how many hours per week do you spend connected?

128

Approximately, what percentage of this time is spent working as a translator? %

What kind of Internet access do you use most of the times?Free (or paid by advertising banners)

Flat (You pay a fixed fee to your Internet Service Provider [=ISP] and you don’t have phone fees topay)

Semi-flat (You buy from your ISP a certain number of connection hours in advance and if you exceedthem you have to pay an extra fee)

Freeserve (You don’t pay any subscription fee to your ISP, but you pay the phone fees when youconnect to it)

Combo (You pay a subscription fee to your ISP and also the phone fees when you connect to it)

Other

Can you read HTML e-mails (i. e. messages containing formatted text, pictures, clickable links andsuch)?

Yes

NoI don’t know/I’m not sure

How often do you check your working email address?Hourly

Several times a day

Once or twice a day

Every other day or less often

When you use your wordprocessor software (i. e. Microsoft Word‰), do you utilize the “Trackchanges” feature?

Yes, often

Yes, sometimes

Yes, rarely

No, neverI don’t know what you are referring to

Continue...

Survey pages and accompanying CGI’s generated using WWW Survey Assistant from S-Ware©1996,1997

[NOTE: First skip pattern fork: who answered «Yes, ...» in the previous question was sent to page 1a/8,whereas the others went directly to page 2/8]!Page 1a/8

Can you briefly explain in which instances you use the “Track changes” feature?

129

Continue...

Page 2/8What kind of multimedia devices do you have available on your computer?

Microphone

Full duplex audio card

WebcamNone of the above

Have you ever held a videoconference or talked over the Internet?Yes

No

What is the first thing that comes to your mind to describe your relationship with your computer?

How would you define your computer expertise?Basic

GoodVery good

Excellent

How do you usually troubleshoot computer related problems?

Now we are going to ask you some questions about your profession as a translator: please answerin general, DO NOT refer exclusively to your working relationship with VD

What are the advantages of your job?

I use it when…

I usually…

130

What are the disadvantages of your job?

To be a translator is:My one and only job

My primary but not only job

My secondary jobAn occasional occupation

Other

How many hours a week, on average, do you spend working as translator?

Approximately what percentage of this time is spent using your computer? %

During which hours do you prefer to work?Very early in the morning (around 5am to 9am)

During the traditional office hours (around 9am to 5pm)

During late afternoon/evening/night (from 5pm on)None of the above/I don’t have a specific preference

Do you work during week-ends?Yes, most of the times

Sometimes

No, only exceptionally!!How does the Internet affects your job as a translator?(If you were a translator before the diffusion of the Internet, we would appreciate it if you could point outthe differences on the job between now and then:-)

!Let’s turn to your specific job characteristics...

The pros are…

The cons are…

131

”Teleworking”(i. e. working with peoplefar away from you, usingyour computer tocommunicate with them)for you is more of a:

1PersonalChoice

2 3 4 5Necessity

Can you expand on this? What do you like about “teleworking”?

...And what do you dislike or find hard to do?

Are you currently working more or less than your DESIRED workload?More

LessThe desired amount

Usually, when you “telework” as a translator, are you physically alone?Yes, most of the times

No, generally not

!!!!!!!!!!!Do you miss the direct interaction with other people?

Yes, often

Well, sometimesNo, not really

If you would like to add something about this topic, you can do so here:

Continue... Page 2/8

I like…

I don’t like…

132

What is/are your nationality/nationalities?

In which country do you currently live? (Please for United States write US)

How many languages do you fluently speak (your mother tongue included)?

Are you currently living or have you ever lived in a country different from your homeland for aperiod equal or longer than 6 months?

Yes

No

Stop and reflect for a second: could you tell us about some “culture shocks” you personallyexperienced when dealing with people from a different culture? (Episodes in which you thought:“Darn, I can’t believe people can think in such a different way!”)

Continue... Page 4/8

By completing this survey you gain the right to receive a free copy of the full report of thisresearch: would you like us to send it to your email address?

Yes, pleaseNo, I don’t care

Oh yes, like that time…

133

Page 4a/8

Please, tell us to which email address we should send the report.

(BY NO MEANS WILL YOUR ADDRESS BE DISCLOSED TO ANYONE ELSE, AND IPERSONALLY GUARANTEE THAT VD WILL NOT ASSOCIATE IT WITH YOUR ANSWERS. —Paolo Brunello]

Continue...

Page 5/8

Let’s talk specifically about your working relationship with VD (formerly Sputnik TranslationServices)

When was the last time that you worked for VD (or Sputnik T. S.)?I am currently involved in a project for you

Within the last 3 months

Within the last yearIt was before the last year

Which Project Manager did you work with most of the times?Have you ever met him or her in person?

Yes

No

Continue...

[NOTE: Second skip pattern fork: who answered «No» in the previous question was sent to page 4a/8,the others instead, were led directly to page 5/8]Page 5a/8

Have you ever wished to meet her/him?Yes, I’d really like to meet her/himWell, sometimes I thought about it, but I can live without it

No, honestly I don’t feel such a need to meet her/him

Have you ever wanted to know how she/he looks like?Yes, I’d really like to see her/his face

Well, sometimes I thought about it, but I can live without it

No, honestly I don’t feel such a need to see her/him

Continue...

134

Page 6/8What kind of media do you use to communicate with VD?

EmailMost often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

PhoneMost often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

FaxMost often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

eFax and suchMost often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

PersonMost often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

Regular mailMost often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

Under which circumstances do you prefer to use the phone instead of sending an email?

How often do you wish you could talk or quickly ask something to the Project Manager, but yougive up because the communication constraints make the effort not worthwhile?

Most oftenOften

Sometimes

Rarely

Never

What kind of technical problems do you most commonly encounter when working with us?Unreadable attachments/file formats

The file is too bigThe technical requirements for working with us are too high

Late payments

The Internet connection breaks

Our ftp server is hard to access

PC/Mac compatibility issuesNone o Problemi di compatibilità PC/Mac f the above

Other problems like the ones I specified below:

135

Please specify:

What kind of relational problems do you most commonly encounter when working with us?Scarce availability of the Project Manager

Poor organization/coordination or unclear assignments

The Project Manager has a mentality very different from mine

Coldness, unfriendlyness

Lack of information about the context of use of the document to be translated

The Project Manager is too directiveI wish I could have more feedback about my job

The Project Manager is too demanding (in terms of time pressure, price, etc.)

None of the above

Misunderstandings like the ones I specified below:Please specify:

Do you have a personal network of translators you collaborate with (not necessarily other VDSubcontractors)?

YesNo

Continue...

Page 6a/8What kind of media do you use to communicate with them?

EmailMost often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

Chat/InstantMessenger Most often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

PhoneMost often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

FaxMost often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

136

eFax and suchMost often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

PersonMost often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

Regular mailMost often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

[For my scientific purposes, I would like to investigate this topic further: if you are available for ashort phone interview (to be scheduled at your convenience), or a chat or at least a personal emailexchange, please write your email address below. I might contact you.

BY NO MEANS WILL YOUR ADDRESS BE DISCLOSED TO ANYONE ELSE, AND IPERSONALLY GUARANTEE THAT VD WILL NOT ASSOCIATE IT WITH YOUR ANSWERS.

- Paolo Brunello]

Continue...

Page 7/8Besides VD, for how many other translation agencies are you currently working?

0 to 2

3 to 5

6 to 8

9 to 11

12 or more

Generally speaking, what do you consider most important when working with a translationagency?

Translation ratesMost

importantVery

importantFairly

importantLess

importantLeast

important

Reliability inpayments Most

importantVery

importantFairly

importantLess

importantLeast

important

Clarity of theassignments Most

importantVery

importantFairly

importantLess

importantLeast

important

137

Availability forquestions Most

importantVery

importantFairly

importantLess

importantLeast

important

Interpersonalrelationship with the

agency’s peopleMost

importantVery

importantFairly

importantLess

importantLeast

important

Punctuality inpayments Most

importantVery

importantFairly

importantLess

importantLeast

important

Loyalty to youMost

importantVery

importantFairly

importantLess

importantLeast

important

ProfessionalismMost

importantVery

importantFairly

importantLess

importantLeast

important

Other:

Your “Other”Most

importantVery

importantFairly

importantLess

importantLeast

important

Continue...

Page 8/8What are your favorite computer-based translation tools?

Links (online dictionaries, directories, databases, etc.):

Software (specific for translation):

138

Mailing lists, listservers, newsgroups:

Other:

Would you be willing to share these aids with other translators working with VD?Yes

No

Yes, but only if under certain conditions that I specify belowMy conditions for sharing:

How did you find out about your Internet-based translation tools?A colleague told me

A friend told me

Using a search engineThrough a mailing list/listserver

In a newsgroup

Through advertisment (banners, newspaper/magazine ads, radio ads, etc.)

Specialized publications for translators

Other

Continue...

If you had to invent a metaphor for VD, what would it be?

(Optional question) How do YOU see the relationship between your cultural background and thecommunication via computer (email and such...)? How do you think they influence each other?

139

Thank you so much!!!

We are very grateful to you for your collaboration and we hope it wasn’t too long or boring!If you want to leave us your comments on this initiative, you are welcome to do so!

NOWBE SURE

TO CLICKON THE

RIGHT BUTTON (submit)!

reset submit

140

Attachment 3. Missing answer(s) page.

Ops, it looks like you did not answer the following question(s):

As a translator, how many computers do you use?

(…)

Please, click on the back button of your browser and answer in order to continue.

Survey pages and accompanying CGI’s generated using WWW Survey Assistant from S-Ware©1996,1997

141

Attachment 4. Frequencies and percentages of all the answers to multiple

choice questions as they appear in the order they were asked.

SAMPLE SIZE: 36ITEM: As a translator, how many computers do you use?

COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

1 19 52.78

2 or more 17 47.22

ITEM: How many years have you had access to the Internet?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Less than 1 year 0 0.00

1 or 2 years 2 5.56

3 or 4 years 9 25.00

More than 4 years 25 69.44

ITEM: Where do you connect from (most of the times)?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Home 30 83.33

Office 5 13.89

University 0 0.00

It varies so much that I can’t tell 0 0.00

Other location 1 2.78

142

ITEM: What kind of Internet access do you use most of the times?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Free (or paid by advertising banners) 0 0.00

Flat (You pay a fixed fee to yourInternet Service Provider [=ISP] andyou don’t have phone fees to pay)

25 69.44

Semi-flat (You buy from your ISP acertain number of connection hoursin advance and if you exceed themyou have to pay an extra fee)

2 5.56

Freeserve (You don’t pay anysubscription fee to your ISP, but youpay the phone fees when you connectto it)

0 0.00

Combo (You pay a subscription feeto your ISP and also the phone feeswhen you connect to it)

9 25.00

Other 0 0.00

ITEM: Can you read HTML e-mails (containing formatted text, pictures, clickable links)?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Yes 34 94.44

No 1 2.78

I don’t know/I’m not sure 1 2.78

ITEM: How often do you check your working email address?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Hourly 14 38.89

Several times a day 19 52.78

Once or twice a day 3 8.33

Every other day or less often 0 0.00

143

ITEM: When you use your wordprocessor software (i. e. Microsoft Word), do you utilize the“Track changes” feature?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Yes, often 3 8.33

Yes, sometimes 17 47.22

Yes, rarely 7 19.44

No, never 5 13.89

I don’t know what you are referring to 4 11.11

ITEM: What kind of multimedia devices do you have available on your computer?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Microphone 23 63.89

Full duplex audio card 18 50.00

Webcam 4 11.11

None of the above 6 16.67

ITEM: Have you ever held a videoconference or talked over the Internet?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Yes 12 33.33

No 24 66.67

ITEM: How would you define your computer expertise?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Basic 6 16.67

Good 12 33.33

Very good 11 30.56

Excellent 7 19.44

144

ITEM: To be a translator is:COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

My one and only job 23 63.89

My primary but not only job 8 22.22

My secondary job 1 2.78

An occasional occupation 4 11.11

Other 0 0.00

ITEM: During which hours do you prefer to work?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

Very early in the morning (around 5am to 9am) 6

During the traditional office hours (around 9am to5pm)

15

During late afternoon/evening/night (from 5pm on) 8

None of the above/I don’t have a specific preference 12

ITEM: Do you work during week-ends?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Yes, most of the times 18 50.00

Sometimes 13 36.11

No, only exceptionally 5 13.89

145

ITEM: “Teleworking”(i. e. working with people far away from you, using your computer to communicate with them)

for you is more of a:COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

1 Personal Choice 13 36.11

2 4 11.11

3 4 11.11

4 2 5.56

5 Necessity 13 36.11

ITEM: Are you currently working more or less than your DESIRED workload?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

More 13 36.11

Less 10 27.78

The desired amount 13 36.11

ITEM: Usually, when you “telework” as a translator, are you physically alone?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Yes, most of the times 29 80.56

No, generally not 5 13.89

It varies 2 5.56

146

ITEM: Do you miss the direct interaction with other people?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0

Yes, often 3 8

Well, sometimes 16 44

No, not really 17 47

ITEM: What is/are your nationality/nationalities?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

US 9 25.00

Canadian from the Province of Quebec (French Canadianmother tongue) 1 2.78

Mexican 1 2.78

Brazilian 1 2.78

Argentine 3 8.33

Italian 1 2.78

Romanian 1 2.78

French 3 8.33

Senegalese 1 2.78

French/Canadian 2 5.56

U.S. citizen/Mexican citizen 1 2.78

British 1 2.78

US and Polish 1 2.78

US citizen- native of Finland- actively pursuing dualcitizenship 1 2.78

Brazilian / Portuguese 1 2.78

Brazilian/Spanish 1 2.78

Japanese 1 2.78

Cuban 1 2.78

Spanish 1 2.78

Thai 1 2.78

147

US citizen with Korean origin 1 2.78

German 1 2.78

Indian 1 2.78

ITEM: In which country do you currently live? (Please for United States write US)COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

US 21 58.33

Canada 3 8.33

Mexico 1 2.78

Argentina 3 8.33

Italy 1 2.78

United Kingdom 2 5.56

France 2 5.56

Brazil 2 5.56

India 1 2.78

ITEM: How many languages do you fluently speak (your mother tongue included)?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

2 24 66.67

3 9 25.00

4 3 8.33

ITEM: Are you currently living or have you ever lived in a country different from your homelandfor a period equal or longer than 6 months?

COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Yes 30 83.33

No 6 16.67

ITEM: By completing this survey you gain the right to receive a free copy of the full report of thisresearch: would you like us to send it to your email address?

148

COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Yes, please 31 86.11

No, I don’t care 5 13.89

ITEM: When was the last time that you worked for VD (or Sputnik T. S.)?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

I am currently involved in a project for you 5 13.89

Within the last 3 months 15 41.67

Within the last year 10 27.78

It was before the last year 6 16.67

ITEM: Have you ever met him or her in person?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Yes 6 16.67

No 30 83.33

ITEM: Have you ever wished to meet her/him?COUNT: 30/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 6 17

Yes, I’d really like to meet her/him 10 28

Well, sometimes I thought about it, but I can livewithout it

16 44

No, honestly I don’t feel such a need to meether/him

4 11

149

ITEM: Have you ever wanted to know how she/he looks like?COUNT: 30/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 6 17

Yes, I’d really like to see her/his face 9 25

Well, sometimes I thought about it, but I canlive without it

18 50

No, honestly I don’t feel such a need to seeher/him

3 8

What kind of media do you use to communicate with VD?ITEM: Email

COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Most often 26 72.22

Often 6 16.67

Sometimes 2 5.56

Rarely 1 2.78

Never 1 2.78

ITEM: PhoneCOUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Most often 7 19.44

Often 10 27.78

Sometimes 8 22.22

Rarely 8 22.22

Never 3 8.33

ITEM: FaxCOUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

150

Most often 0 0.00

Often 5 13.89

Sometimes 17 47.22

Rarely 8 22.22

Never 6 16.67

ITEM: eFax and suchCOUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Most often 1 2.78

Often 3 8.33

Sometimes 6 16.67

Rarely 7 19.44

Never 19 52.78

ITEM: PersonCOUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Most often 0 0.00

Often 0 0.00

Sometimes 3 8.33

Rarely 3 8.33

Never 30 83.33

151

ITEM: Regular mailCOUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Most often 0 0.00

Often 0 0.00

Sometimes 3 8.33

Rarely 10 27.78

Never 23 63.89

ITEM: How often do you wish you could talk or quickly ask something to the Project Manager,but you give up because the communication constraints make the effort not worthwhile?

COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Most often 1 2.78

Often 1 2.78

Sometimes 3 8.33

Rarely 17 47.22

Never 14 38.89

ITEM: What kind of technical problems do you most commonly encounter when working with us?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unreadable attachments/file formats 4 11.11

The file is too big 0 0.00

The technical requirements for workingwith us are too high

0 0.00

Late payments 8 22.22

The Internet connectio breaks 0 0.00

Our ftp server is hard to access 1 2.78

PC/Mac compatibility issues 1 2.78

None of the above 25 69.44

Other problems like the ones I specifiedbelow:

4 11.11

152

ITEM: What kind of relational problems do you most commonly encounter when working withus?

COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Scarce availability of the Project Manager 0 0.00

Poor organization/coordination or unclearassignments

2 5.56

The Project Manager has a mentality verydifferent from mine

1 2.78

Coldness, unfriendlyness 1 2.78

Lack of information about the context ofuse of the document to be translated

0 0.00

The Project Manager is too directive 0 0.00

I wish I could have more feedback aboutmy job

3 8.33

The Project Manager is too demanding (interms of time pressure, price, etc.)

1 2.78

None of the above 30 83.33

Misunderstandings like the ones Ispecified below:

0 0.00

ITEM: Do you have a personal network of translators you collaborate with (not necessarily otherVD Subcontractors)?

COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Yes 18 50.00

No 18 50.00

153

What kind of media do you use to communicate with them?ITEM: Email

COUNT: 18/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 18 50.00

Most often 13 36.11

Often 5 13.89

Sometimes 0 0.00

Rarely 0 0.00

Never 0 0.00

ITEM: Chat/Instant MessengerCOUNT: 18/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 18 50.00

Most often 2 5.56

Often 2 5.56

Sometimes 3 8.33

Rarely 0 0.00

Never 11 30.56

ITEM: PhoneCOUNT: 18/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 18 50.00

Most often 5 13.89

Often 7 19.44

Sometimes 4 11.11

Rarely 1 2.78

Never 1 2.78

154

ITEM: FaxCOUNT: 18/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 18 50.00

Most often 1 2.78

Often 1 2.78

Sometimes 11 30.56

Rarely 5 13.89

Never 0 0.00

ITEM: eFax and suchCOUNT: 18/36 responded.

Option Count

%total

Unanswered 18 50.00

Most often 0 0.00

Often 2 5.56

Sometimes 3 8.33

Rarely 1 2.78

Never 12 33.33

ITEM: PersonCOUNT: 18/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 18 50.00

Most often 2 5.56

Often 2 5.56

Sometimes 3 8.33

Rarely 6 16.67

Never 5 13.89

155

ITEM: Regular mailCOUNT: 18/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 18 50.00

Most often 0 0.00

Often 0 0.00

Sometimes 1 2.78

Rarely 9 25.00

Never 8 22.22

ITEM: Besides VD, for how many other translation agencies are you currently working?COUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

0 to 2 5 13.89

3 to 5 6 16.67

6 to 8 11 30.56

9 to 11 1 2.78

12 or more 13 36.11

Generally speaking, what do you consider most important when working with a translationagency?

ITEM: Translation ratesCOUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Most important 7 19.44

Very important 21 58.33

Fairly important 8 22.22

Less important 0 0.00

Least important 0 0.00

156

ITEM: Reliability in paymentsCOUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Most important 19 52.78

Very important 14 38.89

Fairly important 2 5.56

Less important 0 0.00

Least important 1 2.78

ITEM: Clarity of the assignmentsCOUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Most important 16 44.44

Very important 18 50.00

Fairly important 2 5.56

Less important 0 0.00

Least important 0 0.00

ITEM: Availability for questionsCOUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Most important 8 22.22

Very important 18 50.00

Fairly important 7 19.44

Less important 3 8.33

Least important 0 0.00

157

ITEM: Interpersonal relationship with the agency’s peopleCOUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Most important 7 19.44

Very important 13 36.11

Fairly important 11 30.56

Less important 4 11.11

Least important 1 2.78

ITEM: Punctuality in paymentsCOUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Most important 14 38.89

Very important 16 44.44

Fairly important 5 13.89

Less important 0 0.00

Least important 1 2.78

ITEM: Loyalty to youCOUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Most important 10 27.78

Very important 15 41.67

Fairly important 6 16.67

Less important 5 13.89

Least important 0 0.00

158

ITEM: ProfessionalismCOUNT: 36/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 0 0.00

Most important 17 47.22

Very important 17 47.22

Fairly important 2 5.56

Less important 0 0.00

Least important 0 0.00

ITEM: Would you be willing to share these aids with other translators working with VD?COUNT: 29/36 responded.

Option count

%total

Unanswered 7 19.44

Yes 22 61.11

No 6 16.67

Yes, but only if under certainconditions that I specify below

1 2.78

ITEM: How did you find out about your Internet-based translation tools?COUNT: 29/36 responded.

Option count

%total

A colleague told me 12 33.33

A friend told me 5 13.89

Using a search engine 16 44.44

Through a mailing list/listserver 9 25.00

In a newsgroup 3 8.33

Through advertisment (banners,newspaper/magazine ads, radio ads, etc.)

4 11.11

Specialized publications for translators 11 30.56

Other 5 13.89

Survey pages and accompanying CGI’s generated using WWW Survey Assistant from S-Ware©1996,1997

159

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