The 180-Page SPA, 78% Leverage and a 72-Hour Certified Deadline
You are lead translator at a small LSP. A client sends a 180-page English share purchase agreement for translation into Spanish for filing with the Commercial Registry in Madrid. Deadline: 72 hours. The agreement has 46 defined terms, 12 schedules, and figures written in both words and digits. Your CAT tool reports 78% leverage from a previous SPA. Many 100% matches come from a deal involving 'Project Falcon' and a different target company; one matched segment still contains the old purchase-price figure. The client permits machine translation only if every segment is post-edited and reviewed by a qualified human, and asks for a 'certified translation'. You have two freelance translators available for 20 hours each over the three days; your own capacity is 12 hours.
1. Assess whether the 72-hour deadline and the certification request are compatible. Show your capacity calculation and what you would tell the client.
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The arithmetic does not support a certified 180-page translation in 72 hours with the stated team. At a planning rate of 500 words per hour, two freelancers at 20 hours each produce 20,000 words, and my 12 hours add 6,000, for 26,000 words. A 180-page agreement at roughly 250 words per page is about 45,000 words. Even with 78% leverage, certification requires human review of every segment, including 100% matches, because the matches contain the wrong target company and an old price. Leverage reduces drafting time, not verification time. I would tell the client that the deadline is achievable only if we add at least two more qualified translators and reviewers, split the document by schedule, and extend delivery by 48 hours for the certified version. Alternatively, we can deliver the main agreement and priority schedules first, with the remaining schedules to follow. I would not accept a 72-hour certified deadline on the current staffing and then quietly certify a partially reviewed text; that would misrepresent the quality assurance actually performed.
2. Design the QA checks for defined terms and figures. Why are 100% TM matches dangerous here?
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I would extract all 46 defined terms into a project glossary and run a terminology QA pass against both source and target, checking capitalization and exact form. For figures, I would run a numeric QA tool that compares all digits and words, then manually check every amount in the purchase-price clause and the schedules for consistency between words and figures. I would also check cross-references and dates. The 100% matches are dangerous because translation memory matches strings, not facts: 'Project Falcon', the target company name, the price, the completion date and the parties are variables that survive a 100% match. A segment can be a perfect string match and still be substantively wrong for this deal. I would therefore treat 100% matches as candidates for verification, not as approved text, and sample 100% of matches containing proper names, numbers, defined terms or dates. The old purchase-price figure is a warning that the TM was not cleaned.
3. What should the certificate say, and what records do you keep?
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The certificate should identify the document by name and page count, state the source and target languages, name the translator and the reviewer, give the date, and certify that the translation is a true and complete translation of the source. If machine translation was used, the certificate need not advertise the tool, but the project record must show that every segment was post-edited and reviewed by a qualified human, as the client permitted. I would avoid 'official' or 'sworn' unless the signatory holds that status in Spain. I would keep the final source and target files, the glossary, the QA reports, the TM version used, reviewer sign-off, and the client's written deadline and certification instructions. Those records let me answer a challenge months later and show that the certificate was not a formality.