A day in the life of an Acclaro project manager: Jennifer Pelland
Hello there! I’m a senior project manager at Acclaro, and I wrote this post to detail my typical day working here.
Years ago, I was working as an HTML coder when the sole localization project manager at my company went on a three-week vacation. My boss thought I’d be a good person to be her vacation back up due to my language background and attention to detail. When my colleague returned, my boss realized there was enough work for two people, so I kept that role. That was eighteen years ago.
A typical day for Jennifer
Every morning, the first thing I do is triage my inbox. I sort my email first by sender, then by subject line so I can quickly see the trends. If anything can be filed away without action, I do that first – seeing the number of unread emails drop gives me a nice dopamine hit.
Next, I start tackling the most time-sensitive emails. Those are usually based on the time zone of the sender, but sometimes an emergency email from a client must come first. One of my clients does a lot of raw machine translation (MT) work, so I check to make sure everything’s going well with those jobs or if I need to ask an engineer to restart a server. Then it’s over to Slack to see if any of my clients have pinged me there.
After the morning emails, the rest of my day is spent handling projects (e.g., price quotes, hand-offs, answering queries, delivering finished translations). I also troubleshoot client issues and pet the cats that sit in front of my monitor and prevent me from doing work. Petting often gets them to lie down and I can resume work.
Other tasks involve monthly reporting, custom MT engine maintenance, and attending meetings. There are some times of the year that tend to be quieter than others, at least for my clients, so when I hit those, I try to spend time doing some online training to help build my skills.
Highlights of Jennifer’s job
I love to help clients find the right solutions for challenging issues. It could be anything from helping them rewrite their user interface (UI) content to make it more localizable, to recommending the best and most accurate way to go forward with a complex subtitling project, to working with their editorial team to determine the most important message of a new marketing tagline. This helps my translators preserve its core meaning while creatively adapting it for their target market.
Interests outside of work
I’ve been belly dancing for close to 20 years. I first tried it for a few years back in the ’90s, then picked it up again 15 years later. I mostly perform a group improv style at festivals with my troupe and am currently learning a specialized form of the style involving swords. And I sometimes solo in both modern fusion and more traditional styles.
Before COVID, I used to do occasional restaurant gigs where I would dance to a band. There’s nothing like performing to live music. I used to write science fiction, but I put that on hold in order to focus time on my job and my dancing.
