University of Padova

General Psychology Department

TO COLLABORATE WITHOUT SEEING EACH OTHER:

TELEWORK
IN A

TRANSNATIONAL VIRTUAL ORGANIZATION

Tutor Professor: Giuseppe Mantovani Candidate: Paolo Brunello

Student ID: 382194/PS

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To my parents
(and to theirs)

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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”? ........................................................................................... 13
1.3. WHY IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VD AND ITS SUBCONTRACTORS INTERESTING? .................. 15
1.4. THE SPECIFIC RESEARCH CONTEXT: VD AND ITS CULTURE .......................................................... 19
1.4.1. The workprocess................................................................................................................ 21
1.4.2. Why transnational? ........................................................................................................... 24
1.5. INTERNAL COMMUNICATION AT VD............................................................................................ 25
1.5.1. 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” ........................................................................................... 33
2.3. 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 ................................................................................................................... 37
2.3.5.1. 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 ................................................................................................................ 41

3.1.1. Fieldnotes.......................................................................................................................... 41
3.1.2. The interviews ................................................................................................................... 42
3.2. THE EMAIL EXCHANGES ANALYSIS .............................................................................................. 42
3.2.1. Structural analysis............................................................................................................. 42
3.2.1.1. The email management system ........................................................................................................ 42
3.2.2. Operative analysis ............................................................................................................. 44
3.2.2.1. 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................................ 88
3.3.3.1. 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 ...................................................................................................................... 121

3.5. 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. ......................................................................................................... 127
ATTACHMENT 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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10
 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, functionally
and/or culturally diverse entities that are linked by electronic forms of communication
and 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 network
of people” working together, regardless of location or who “owns” them (Bleeker
1994, 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 a
discrete enterprise and more an ever-varying cluster of common activities in the midst
of 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:

The component entities of a Virtual Organization are:

1. Geographically distributed
2. Electronically linked

3. Functionally or culturally diverse

4. Laterally (versus hierarchically) connected

MAKING THE FOLLOWING

ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGNS POSSIBLE:

A. Highly dynamic processes

B. Contractual relationships

C. Edgeless, permeable boundaries

D. Reconfigurable structures

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

“It is important to note that these attributes can be applied to employee-employer

relationships, 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,

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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 “like
measuring a rubber band” — it is not impossible but the results depend on how far you
stretch 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 IV
Self-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 power
over);
• whose main place of work is at home or who claim not to have a main place of
work;
• who use advanced ICT for communicating with clients and/or (other) business
partners.” (ibidem)

Moreover:
“Individuals who are teleworking from home more than 90% of their overall working
time are referred to as permanent teleworkers, while those working from home less than
90% of their overall working time, but more than one full day per week, are referred to
as 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, a
joint 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 it
as a mean to transmit information, as if something would be transmitted from an
organism to another in such a way that the recipient’s uncertainty domain should be
reduced according to the sender’s. Nevertheless, when it is recognized that language is
connotative and not denotative, and that its function is to orientate the oriented [the
recipient] within his cognitive domain independently from the orientator’s [the sender]
cognitive domain, it becomes evident that there is no information transmission through
language. (…) If it seems acceptable to talk about information transmission in everyday
talks, this happens because who talks implicitly assumes that the listener is identical to
himself 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 the
goal 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 and
research 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,

18
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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20

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

Natasha
General Manager (Founder and Principal)
(Russian)
1995

Galina
Business Development Manager & Project Manager
(Russian)
Dec. 1999

Florence Hilke Vivian Sergeji

Project Manager & Office Manager Project Manager Project Manager Computer Engineer
(British) (American-German) (Brazilian) (Russian)
Jan. 2000 Summer 1998 - (currently Part-time) Nov. 1999 Apr. 2000

Igor
Me System Administrator
Intern/Researcher (Russian)
(Italian) 1997
21st June - 1st Sept. 2000
Eva
Assistant & Coordinator
Subcontractors (Russian; Igor's wife)
(International) Summer 1999 (Part-time)
Translators, Editors, Proofreaders,
Designers, Interpreters
Teleworking Software Developers
(Webdesigners, Programmers, ecc.)
(Russian)

Irina
Accountant
(Russian)
Apr. 2000

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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.

Client (C) contacts VD

1

Office Manager (OM)

VD estimate 2 receives request

end
3 accepted

Office Manager (OM)

Client sends document to be records new project in VD
4
translated via email or ftp database

assigns it to P r o j e c t
Manager responsible for
Project Manager (PM) 5 language pair involved in
Starts searching for
the project
Subcontractors best matching
project requirements 6
Translator
Performs first
Choice depends on translation
7
Subcontractors’
availability and
8
known quality Editor
Edits (even heavily)
9 first translation

13
10
Office Manager, 11
together with Proofreader
accountant, sends
invoice to Client 12
and payments to And/or Layout
Subcontractors designer

Client receives translated

document

22
 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.

23
 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 reversible
role it’s just the translators get all the information together and… it’s not a first draft
that he does, it’s more than that, but it’s a load of info very quickly writing down and
the editor will then come with a fresh pair of eyes they can make it more fluid, they can
catch mistakes, for example, a marketing editor makes it for mass readership. And then
the 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 a
subjective thing anyway you know, but they both have the same qualification, it’s just
that some translators don’t like editing because they say it’s a lot of work but it’s much
less 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 a
bad 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 chosen
by you, right?
FLORENCE: Yes, they don’t work together, but they know their work will be edited and
they’ll even be pleased about that.
ME: Does it ever happen that the translator sends you back the translation and asks
you to take a look at the edited version?
FLORENCE: Yes, that often happen, we will often send them a final version just to take
a look at it, I know Vivian does that often with her teams, especially ‘cause she does a
lot of journalistic translation and the client is very very picky and so she does give them
the 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 country
while its operations are performed in one or more other countries. [I.e. those in which
the labor is cheaper — R. N]. Under this approach, an organization operates in a
centralized manner. Efficiency, obtained through economies of scale, is the key
criterion of effectiveness sought by the global company.
(…) In a multinational strategy, national or regional operations are relatively
autonomous and decentralized in order to increase sensitivity to differences among the
individual countries in which it operates. The key competitive issue is responsiveness to
local markets.
(…) Under an international strategy, enterprises compete on a worldwide basis, against
other international companies. The international approach calls for a more horizontal
structure 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 transfer
knowledge to overseas units, learning constitutes the key issue.
According to Bartlett and Ghoshal, organizations will be most competitive if they

24
 simultaneously meet the challenges of global efficiency, local responsiveness, and
learning. Meeting these challenges requires firms to adopt a transnational strategy in
which each organizational activity is performed in a location where it can be best
accomplished.”

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.)
25
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 gets
done, somehow...
ME: But if it’s a question of planning something new do you have… maybe not regular
meetings 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, very
casually 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.

26
 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 proceeds
incorporates in its water conceptions of rationality and values. These are founded on
the strategies that, more or less deliberately, emerge from the actors, strategies that are
simultaneously 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

27
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)

DIFFERENCES

NORMATIVE- TECHNOCRATIC-
BUREAUCRATIC PATERNAL

ISOLATION PARTICIPATION

INDIVIDUALISTIC- FAMILISTIC-
INDULGENT MATERNAL
EQUALITY

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

28
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.

29
30

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

CULTURESÆ
NORMATIVE- TECHNOCRATIC- INDIVIDUALISTIC-
CHARACTERISTICS FAMILISTIC-MATERNAL
BUREAUCRATIC PATERNAL INDULGENT
Ø
VALUES EQUALITY
PRIMARY VALUE, ON STATUS VALORIZATION OF EQUALITY APPRECIATION LAISSEZ FAIRE, SCARCE
WHICH SELF- FORMALITY RESPECT DIFFERENCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT CONTROL OVER GOALS,
ESTEEM AND SENSE OF DUTY COMPETENCE EXPERIENCE CONSTRAINTS, AUTONOMY.
PRESTIGE INDEPENDENCE
STABILITY
THEY ARE EXPLICITLY
LEADERSHIP’S ORDER EFFICACY AND EFFICIENCY UNITY AND SOLIDARITY
DENIED, BUT PROTECT THE
FUNCTIONS CONTINUITY NEED FOR ACHIEVEMENT NEED FOR AFFILIATION
ORGANIZATION SURVIVAL
SURENESS
IT IS OK ONLY WHEN IT
DENIES ITSELF: THERE ARE
LEADERSHIP STYLE AUTHORITARIAN CONTINGENT PARTICIPATIVE
NO BOSS, ONLY
COLLABORATORS
THROUGH
ACCORDING TO FIDELITY THROUGH SPONTANEOUS
QUALIFICATIONS AND THROUGH SELECTION
CAREER TO THE BOSS AND TO THE AND AUTOMATIC
RIGHTS ACCORDING TO RESULTS
FIRM PHILOSOPHY MECHANISMS
(I.E.: YEARS OF SERVICE)
MERIT AND FAULT
DIS/ALIGNMENT TO THE INFORMAL ASSESSMENT OF
ARE JUDGED RESULTS COMMITMENT
NORM PEOPLE ALTOGETHER
CONSIDERING
DOES NOT TAKE INTO
INCENTIVES AND EQUALITARISM, CONSIDERATION
“PUNISHMENTS” E DIFFERENTIATION ONLY In DIFFERENTIATION SINCE
REWARDS’ EQUITY ACCORDING TO STATUS
ACCORDING TO TECHNICAL CASE OF SOMEONE’S EVERYONE’S PERFORMANCE
AND MANAGEMENT SKILLS PARTICULAR NEEDS DEPENDS ON EVERYONE’S
POTENTIAL
 CALL FOR LOYALTY,
CALL FOR PERFORMANCE CALL FOR SOLIDARITY AND CALL FOR EVERYBODY’S
INCENTIVES FORMAL CORRECTNESS,
IMPROVEMENT UNITY AVAILABILITY TO HELP
RATIONALITY
RELATIONSHIPS
AMONG ROLES:
FORMALLY VERY SUM OF PARTS, NOT AN
ROLES AND FUNCTIONS INTEGRATION- NUMEROUS, BUT BLURRED: ORGANISM,
DIFFERENTIATION ARE VERY DIFFERENTIATION AMONG THE INTERPERSONAL THE INTERPERSONAL
DIFFERENTIATED VERY SPECIALIZED ROLES RELATIONSHIPS NETWORK RELATIONSHIPS NETWORK
PREVAILS PREVAILS
TYPE OF
SCARCE INTEGRATION INTERDEPENDENCE DEPENDENCE INDEPENDENCE
“*-DEPENDENCE”
NEGATIVE: DEVIATION CONFLICT AND CONFLICT DENIED,
CONFLICT IT IS BETTER TO AVOID IT
FROM THE NORM, MUST COMPETITION ARE RESOLVED PRIVATELY,
PERCEPTION AS LONG AS IT IS POSSIBLE
BE AVOIDED PERCEIVED AS NORMAL INFORMALLY
ORGANIZATION VIEWED AS
PSYCHOLOGICAL
COMPLIANCE RESULTS BELONGING/FIDELITY POTENTIALLY LIMITING
CONTRACT fl fl fl PERSONAL FREEDOMfi
INDIVIDUAL/
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT REWARD PROTECTION RECIPROCAL NON-
ORGANIZATION
INTERFERENCE
CLEAR SEPARATION:
FUSION BETWEEN PERSONAL AND PERSONAL IDENTITY
PUBLIC/PRIVATE SUBJECTIVITY ALLOWED
PROFESSIONAL AND PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY PREVAILS OVER
DIMENSION ONLY AT HOME, NOT AT
PERSONAL IDENTITY ARE BLURRED PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY
WORK
LOW SOCIALIZATION, HIGH SOCIALIZATION
ORGANIZATION HIGH SOCIALIZATION, LOW SOCIALIZATION
FORMALITY, AFFECTIVE SOLIDARITY AND UNITY
ATMOSPHERE STRESS INDIFFERENCE, DIFFIDENCE
COLDNESS FEELINGS
31
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.

32
 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 that
Polany(1958) called “the passionate participation in the act of knowing”, not aiming to
get to an absolute plausibility of the interpretation, but to make evident the plausibility
of 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
33
 to obtain information about the potential environment. If perceptions are possible
starting from categorizations, the mind extracts from reality, as it is socially
constructed, the linguistic means apt to make it accessible and shared. The everyday
language, like the other forms of specialized language, are tools that, while giving to
the world its reality, are structuring the mind according to those relations of which the
language 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 is
independent from rules of use, meanings and other artifacts: they are rather drifting
platforms, 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

34
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 everyday
behavior); in the second respondents (data providers through their answers to the
researcher’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.

35
 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 my
hard-drive, simply connecting the recorder earphone output to the external microphone input jack on
my computer, via a common mono-mono cable; c) finally, I used shareware application (Listen&Type
2.2) that associates the audio file to a word processor and allows you to play, stop, rewind the
interview using solely the keyboard, thus avoiding the tedious back and forth from the keyboard to the
recorder buttons.

36
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;

37
 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;

38
 • 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 Assistant”
(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.

39
 (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.

40
 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;

41
 • 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.

42
 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

43
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

44
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)
Florence, Vivian,
Client (C, -08),
People involved: 6 Lucio (T, +01),
Julio (T, -03),
Aleardo, Brazilian as Vivian, (T, -06)
First message date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 17:12:10 -0800
Last message date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 09:09:50 -0800
Total number of exchanged Project total
113 79 days
messages: duration:
VD-Lucio= 9h => overlapping: 1h (8:30-9:30VD, 17:30-
18:30 Lucio)
Time zone differences:
VD-Julio= 5h
VD-Aleardo= 2h
PRJ 1734 + 1741: Post-editing of an engine manual in
Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
This implies an extra middle man compared to
regular projects, since who originally wrote the
Project description:
manual in English, sent it to an automatic translation
company to translate it; this company is VD Client
(C), since it asked VD to do the post-editing from
robot-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.

45
46

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 of Comments/

move Interpretation
2 Subject: DATE_DUE: 12/05/2000 Deadlin Template Vivian uses a pre-
JOB# 1741 e in 25 arranged template
Date: PROJ_MAN: Vivian Pessoa days Example of localization:
Thu, 09 Nov 2000 10:47:33 -0800 B.Porto Vivian specifies that the
It is 12:47 for Aleardo guese= target language is
3 days after the Client has approved LANG_PAIR: Engl. > B. Portuguese Brazilia Portuguese for the
the VD estimate Dear Aleardo, n P. Brazilian market
“Dear <name>“ in this
From: case is a rather formal
Vivian salutation: being Italian it
has been sometimes
To: difficult to assess the
Aleardo Other Confirmation “formality level” used in
<Aleardo@Aleardoserver.br> As we just discussed on the phone, I have Seal Course & medium Information each message.
Engine Course attached and zipped. : phone Negotiation Reference to
There are 4 zips, English & Portuguese for each Course. Job communication on
If you agree to work on this job, the priority for delivering Attachm acceptance, another medium
is the Engine Course. ents: Priority, The negotiation tone is
The final deadline is Tuesday 12/05, but I would like to split 467k Deadline courteous, but not
the delivery. Proposal rhetorical: it seems to
assume the real possibility
of a refusal by the T.
 Engine assume the real possibility
Course of a refusal by the T.
Please let me know how your schedule would be. Redundancy
Request for
Portugu feedback on Vivian leaves a decision
ese.zip job margin to T, setting him
organization free to manage how to
Please send me your confirmation asap. Engine Confirmation split the job batches.
Course request for
English. negotiation The gentle “please” is
Thank you very much. zip acceptance counterbalanced by a
Sincerely, Formal thanks rougher “asap”.
Seal and standard
Vivian Pessoa Course , salutations
Project Manager Portugu
ese.zip
47
48
 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<->Florence
Lucio -> Florence Florence -> Lucio
Aleardo -> 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.

49
 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
50trust and enable the other party to contact them even outside the regular times, for
example during the weekend:
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 on
Florence@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 the51
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!»).
 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
52
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 found
some 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.

53
 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 maintain
conversational 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

54
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

55
 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 several
questions and I need the answers in order to ask the next question. But email is fine for
most things.”

Summarizing,
“(…) in the asynchronous CMC two typical aspects of conversational processes are
missing:
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 working
out 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 a
five 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

56
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 again
soon.
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 worked
on. Thanks
Once 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)

57
58

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

N. Heading f Message body Tech Conversatio Comments/
nal move Interpretation
57 Subject: CLIENT: Who Inc. Template Vivian is the only Project
PRJ# 1546 <<last file finished>> CONTACT: Charles Who Spa- Manager who uses a
Date: DATE_DUE: 06/23/2000 Music template that she
Fri, 23 Jun 2000 13:28:53 -0700 PROJ_MAN: Vivian Pessoa Protocol customizes each time
From: 0 LANG_PAIR: English > Spanish (Mex.M.) V1.6_01
Vivian =========================================== .zip Standard
Dear Charles, (Edit) to salutation Vivian with this
To: avoid expression “As we had
As we had agreed, confusio agreed” is subtly
Client@clientserver.com n with Confirmation emphasizing that the
I have the Final-Music Protocol V1.6_01_Spa (Edit).doc file previous Delivery project has been delivered
attached, versions notification respecting all the
which was translated and edited into Spanish for the Mexican Spa. Redundant condition agreed upon.
Market. Indicate information This closing message
s the rehearsal summarizes the main
languag characteristics of the
e project
While stating her
Availability availability, Vivian
If you have any questions, please let me know. for renews her commitment
clarification to the Client and gives
Courteous continuity to it by asking
Please, as soon as you have a chance, tone for the usual receipt
send to me a confirmation that you received all of the 3 files Receipt confirmation in order to
and you have everything as you were expecting. confirmation avoid misunderstanding
Thank you for your business. request and and for the Client’s
Sincerely, feedback feedback on customer
request on satisfaction thus showing
Vivian Pessoa , Project Manager customer high professionalism
satisfaction
Formal thanks
and
salutations
 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 team
has 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 we
can give good quality jobs, because before they were new clients and we spent time
working back and forth, back and forth, adjusting, hiring new people, this is the real
process (…)

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 lets
say an engine manual, it will be reviewed by engineers, which is great, I’ll get some
feedback from them, but the actual user will be a mechanic, and the mechanic, you
know, may have more questions and I never know about those so that is a problem in
that 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

59
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

60
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 during
the 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.

61
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

62
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.
Interval
Sender’s date and Recipient’s date and
# Sender Recipient time (starting
time
from 8:30)
Fri, 10 Nov 2000 Fri, 10 Nov 2000
1 Florence Lucio
11:07 20:07
Fri, 10 Nov Fri, 10 Nov
2 Lucio Florence 54’
21:01 12:01
Fri, 10 Nov Fri, 10 Nov
3 Florence Lucio 2h 8’
14:09 23:09
Fri, 10 Nov Fri, 10 Nov
4 Florence Lucio 8’
14:17 23:17
Sat, 11 Nov Fri, 10 Nov
5 Lucio Florence 2h 11’
01:28 16:28
Fri, 10 Nov Sat, 11 Nov
6 Florence Lucio 19’
16:47 01:47
2 days
Mon, 13 Nov Mon, 13 Nov (Sun) 12 h
7 Lucio Florence
14:38 5:38 49’
Mon, 13 Nov Mon, 13 Nov 3 h 50’
8 Florence Lucio
09:28 18:28 (58’)
Mon, 13 Nov Mon, 13 Nov
9 Florence Lucio 4 h 52’
14:20 23:20
9 h 23’
Tue, 14 Nov Mon, 13 Nov
10 Lucio Florence
08:43 23:43 (13’)
Tue, 14 Nov Mon, 13 Nov
11 Lucio Florence 1’
08:44 23:44
Tue, 14 Nov Tue, 14 Nov 9 h 57’
12 Florence Lucio
09:41 18:41 (1 h 11’)
Tue, 14 Nov Tue, 14 Nov
13 Florence Lucio 3 h 47’
13:28 22:28
Tue, 14 Nov Tue, 14 Nov
14 Florence Lucio 10’
13:38 22:38

9
Not counting the Sunday, where there were no messages.

63
 Tue, 14 Nov Tue, 14 Nov
15 Lucio Florence 16’
22:54 13:54
Tue, 14 Nov Tue, 14 Nov
16 Florence Lucio 52’
14:46 23:46
7 h 10’
Wed, 15 Nov Tue, 14 Nov
17 Lucio Florence
06:56 21:56 (1 h 34’)
Wed, 15 Nov Wed, 15 Nov 12 h 5’
18 Florence Lucio
10:01 19:01 (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.

64
 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 message
Florence Russian (…)
Subcontractor, I am attaching an efax10 for you which is the translation that I have
Ivan been 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 number
where 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 you
tomorrow
but please take into consideration that there’s no fax at our
informatics department nor at the mathematics faculty in the
whole,
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).

65
 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 invoices
Please 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 image
or audio file attached to an email.

66
67
68

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 Conversati Comments/

onal move Interpretation
5 Subject: Dear VIVIAN: Use of a Standard
different salutation
Re: JOB# 1587 <<B.2nd-ba>> medium
I got your fax, but the last two pages of the third document (fax)
Date: must have got cut off. Technic The fax is not very
Problem
al notification reliable
Tue, 18 Jul 2000 10:01:03 -0500
proble Job refusal of
It is 08:01 for Vivian m a project
From: previously The Subcontractor
But that aside, I will not have time to translate the activates a set of courtesy
documents, I’m sorry to say. agreed upon,
John over the strategies aiming to
phone. reduce the inevitable gap
Related that his refusal has created
To: with respect to Vivian’s
It turns out that I have too much work and too apologies.
Vivian many personal obligations to accept any other projects this expectations.
month. Justification Notably the expression he
uses is «It turns out that»:
Apologies thus he is displacing
outside the locus of
I’m sorry I didn’t realize this yesterday. control, “softening” his
Promise
Operative fault: it simply is
I will be sending two of the three files you sent earlier soon, something that happens
and I will send the last on or before Friday. problem:
missed sometimes, like an
deadline for accident.
third file
delivery.
 and I will send the last on or before Friday. missed sometimes, like an
deadline for accident.
I will be away from home today and third file As compensation he
tomorrow, but if you need to, you can reach me on my cell delivery. confirms he is going to
phone at (xxx) xxx-xxxx. Information send two of the three files
Accessibility to be translated today, and
the third will arrive on
Friday, that is, 3 days late.
Finally he seems to
demonstrate his goodfaith
and his commitment to fix
the problem he caused, by
leaving his cell phone
number, even if he is out
Formal for private affairs.
Sincerely, salutation
John
6 Subject: Galina, Salutation The greeting is very
Lateral direct, no frills, very task-
[Fwd: JOB# 1587 <<B.2nd-ba>>] To keep you informed... communicati oriented.
-- on in order to Galina is co-Project
Sincerely, ensure Manager with Vivian, and
Date:
redundancy therefore Vivian keeps
Tue, 18 Jul 2000 09:23:07 -0700 her informed about the
Vivian Pessoa project progress in two
It is 11:23 for John ways: sending her in CC:
Project Manager
the messages she sends to
Vivian communicates John’s refusal
the Subcontractors and
to her colleague, Galina, one and half
[John’s message follows quoted] forwarding her some
hour after John sent it, but probably
important messages from
she is just arrived at the office.
the Subcontractors. This
From: Vivian
maintains the relationship
To: Galina
alive and collaborative
69
70

7 Subject: Dear VIVIAN: Sent 2 Information

hours Admission of
Re: JOB# 1587 after the an operative
Here are two of the three files you sent to be translated. notificat problem
Date: 2 ion of (translation)
Please note that in the first file, env.doc, I wasn’t sure of the missing for lack of John has a translation
Tue, 18 Jul 2000 11:52:26 -0500 h claimant, which I assumed to be the US Navy.
deadline context
problem, but immediately
It is 09:52 for Vivian for the information
From: third provides a possible
file.
John If this is wrong, please change the highlighted portion. solution, proving very
Pre-arranged
solution zealous.
To: If this is correct, please delete the highlight. Attachm
Vivian ents:
This reconfirmation of
Part 1.2 Reconfirmatio
CC: I will be out of town for two days, but you can reach me on availability to be
Type: n of
Galina my cell phone at (xxx) xxx-xxxx. contacted can be
Macinto accessibility
considered as another
sh File
John for the first time remembers to courtesy strategy, to show
Part 1.3
CC: Galina. I have two administrative requests. participation to the
Type:
problem he generated.
Macinto
(1) Please send a work order for this project. I never received At this point though, John
sh File
one. does a countermove and
Administrati
“attacks” gently VD on its
ve requests
weakness, namely the
(1) formal
(2) I have yet to receive payment for several translation jobs I scarce formalization of
work order
did earlier. work orders and the late
request
payments.
(2) payment
John is very delicate on
request
this topic: he definitely
Could you please check on these for me? question (very
wants to maintain a
polite:
positive relationship.
I would be happy to resubmit an invoice. conditional)
Specifying that he
Declaration of
received the payments for
So far, I have received payment for two jobs. complete
two jobs, he is implicitly
availability
saying that he is not
Thank you, Receipt
accusing VD to be
John Confirmation
insolvent, but simply
Standard
solicit them for the delay.
thanks
Moreover he does not say
«...for only two jobs.» that
would have bittered his
tone. On the other hand
though, with this
countermove he is
recalling VD faults, thus
reassessing and
minimizing his own
faults. It sound a bit like:
 «...for only two jobs.» that
would have bittered his
tone. On the other hand
though, with this
countermove he is
recalling VD faults, thus
reassessing and
minimizing his own
faults. It sound a bit like:
«Hey guys, nodoby is
perfect, right?».
71
 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):

72
73
74
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 Conversati Comments/

onal move Interpretation
62 Subject: With a very calm and dry
Dear Angelica, Receipt tone, not accusatory, nor
Re: JOB# 1546 The invoice you sent to me yesterday has been confirmation threatening, Vivian
received.However, we had agreed $0.02 per word edited Problem notifies Angelica that her
Date: since we have been working together. notification invoice is incorrect. With
On 06/16/00 (4:55pm) I wrote to you: 1. The text must be this tone Vivian takes for
Tue, 27 Jun 2000 10:57:20 -0700
edited for the Mexican Market. granted that she has no
It is 12:57 for Angelica The deadline for this editing job is Monday (06/19) and the Literal doubts about Angelica’s
rate is $0.02 per word, as we had discussed since we start to quotation of good faith, and after
From: work on that... the previous having quoted the
You agreed with that, remember... negotiation previous messages
Vivian “We both agree in everything. Then, I’ll get to work on Problem containing the terms
this.”, you wrote 06/16/00 at 9:14pm. suggested agreed upon, she declares
I believe there has been a misunderstanding on that. explanation she believes there was a
To: In the invoice you sent the rate is $0.04 instead $0.02. misunderstanding.
Angelica Could you please send to me a new invoice? Solution Consequently she offers
Thank you very much. proposal to solve the problem by
Sincerely, Formal thanks gently but firmly
Vivian requesting a new,
Project Manager corrected invoice.
 63 Subject: RE: JOB# 1546 4 Dear Vivian, Invoice1 Lively The Subcontractor
You are so right! 546.doc exclamation recognizes immdiately her
Date:
h I’m sorry very much, I got confused because 0.02/word is Apologies fault and Vivian’s
4.40 for every 220 words, and then I had the idea of “4”. The Justification rightness: in this way she
Tue, 27 Jun 2000 16:35:44 -0500
Anyway, I’m sending you the invoice corrected. previous Acceptance of avoids any possible doubt
It is 14:35 for Vivian
3 message Vivian’s on her own good faith.
From: 5 is suggested She justifies herself and
’ entirely solution then complies with
Angelica Sorry again, and thank you very much. quoted Further Vivian’s suggested
Best regards, at the apologies and solution.
To: Angelica end of thanks formal
Vivian this one salutation
75
76

64 Subject: 2 Minimization In this message Vivian

Dear Angelica, Empathy first wants to reassure
Re: JOB# 1546 <<i>> Reassurance Angelica, that is to say
h There is no problem at all!
she cares for their
Date: We all do that when we have so much going on ... interpersonal relationship,
2 beyond the professional
Tue, 27 Jun 2000 16:55:12 -0700 0 Do not worry, I understand it!! Update and one.
It is 18:55 for Angelica ’ The invoice you just sent to me is on the way. You will get promise Then she specifies the
the payment in 30 days. effect of the correction
Optional from the workprocess
From: If you have any questions about that, you can email Irina at: request for point of view, commiting
Vivian irina@VD.com. feedback and on VD behalf to pay her
availability in 30 days.
declaration This expression («If you
To: have any questions about
She is the person who takes care of accountant. Information
Angelica about VD that») is very frequent and
Thank you very much for all your hard work. Thanks establishes a sort of
Confirmation “silence means ok” rule,
As I told you, as soon as I receive a new job that matches
with which, after a series
your expertise, I will contact you. Thanks of “Over”, we get to the
Further final “Over”.
reassurance The availability
Sincerely, and thanks declaration and the
explanation about who
Irina is, can be considered
Vivian Pessoa as opening up VD to the
Subcontractor, in order to
Project Manager
increase familiarity with
her. After the ritual
thanks, Vivian spends few
more words to newly
reassure Angelica, thus
resetting the original
harmony in the
relationship.
 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 my
personal email at home at all.
Even if I were to give you that email address, you would not be able to get in touch with
me 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 directly
related to the translation jobs, for which I don’t consider a ‘company’ email address

77
 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.

78
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 you
currently 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 much
smaller than the potential 3000, 800, or 200 that Natasha declared to me in different occasions.

79
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.

80
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.

81
 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 formatted
text, 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 your
computer?
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 the
Internet?
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):

82
 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

83
 Question: What kind of media do you use to communicate with VD?
Table 20. ITEM: Email
Count: 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: Phone

Count: 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: Fax

Count: 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 such

Count: 36/36 responded.
%
Option ƒ total
Most often 1 3
Often 3 8
Sometimes 6 17
Rarely 7 19
Never 19 53

84
 Table 24. ITEM: Person
Count: 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 mail

Count: 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

85
 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 collaborate
with (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: Email
Count: 18/36 responded.
parti %
Option ƒ al % 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: Phone

Count: 18/36 responded.
parti %
Option ƒ al % total
Most often 5 28 14
Often 7 38 19
Sometimes 4 22 11
Rarely 1 6 3
Never 1 6 3

86
 Table 30. ITEM: Fax
Count: 18/36 responded.
parti %
Option ƒ al % 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 such

Count: 18/36 responded.
parti %
Option ƒ al % 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: Person

Count: 18/36 responded.
parti %
Option ƒ al % 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 mail

Count: 18/36 responded.
parti %
Option ƒ al % total
Most often 0 0 0
Often 0 0 0
Sometimes 1 6 3
Rarely 9 50 25
Never 8 44 22

87
 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: please
answer 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 pros are…

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 decide
whether to accept an assignment or not, if I want to work weekends or until late at
night, there are no schedules, no office attire, and best of all: no boss!!”

88
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 exception
of tight deadlines) is convenient for me. I have a baby, so this is a major advantage, I
can 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 with 1 2 3 4 5
people far away Personal Necessity
from you, using Choice
your computer to
communicate with
them)
for you is more of
a:

Can you expand on this? What do you like about “teleworking”?

I like…

...And what do you dislike or find hard to do?

I don’t like…

With these three questions the focus on telework became explicit.

89
 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 and
smoke cigarettes and I don’t have to talk with anybody or have people nosing on what I
am 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 their
business based on their knowing about me because of the quality of my work.”

90
…to an outspoken:
“I like ‘teleworking’ because it allows dealing with people around the world without
absolutely necessitating ‘direct personal contacts’ like meetings, telephone
conversations; the whole process can very well be totally managed through simple
email communications and email’s attachments, which prevents all kind of personal
contact 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, or
something I’ve done wrong! No predictable holidays, chaos in social commitments,
cannot pursue any definite course of further education/skill-building, can’t go for
holidays, and when I do I have to access my e-mail at least 1/2’ce a day, can’t plan
major investments (like real estate), because I am never sure how much and when I will
be 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 they
make 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;

91
 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 working
in 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.
Parti %
Option _ al % total
Yes, I’d really like to meet her/him 10 33 28
Well, sometimes I thought about it, but I can
16 53 44
live without it
No, honestly I don’t feel such a need to meet
4 13 11
her/him

Table 36. ITEM: Have you ever wanted to know how she/he looks like?
Count: 30/36 responded.
parti %
Option _ al %. total
Yes, I’d really like to see her/his face 9 30 25
Well, sometimes I thought about it, but I can
18 60 50
live without it
No, honestly I don’t feel such a need to see
3 10 8
her/him

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).
92
 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 to
meet… I had never met… what’s her name?
ME: Vivian
LEE: Vivian so I wanted to meet her and see
ME: 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’t
figure 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 with
or 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 the
voice 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.

93
 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 physically
alone?
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:

94
 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 know
by 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 certain
group of people as in an office.
There is a lot less negative interaction and people are more willing to share of their
knowledge, since this by no means diminishes their worth in the marketplace. In an
office, 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 drive
around the countryside with my wife.
I don’t seem to need a ‘normal’ social life, I dislike social occasions, parties: they are a
waste of time!
I prefer deeper person-to-person contact but it is hard to come by, and even friends, on
the 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 freelance
translator, since I am more or less my own boss, working the way I like to work and

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 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 a
while) 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 need
supervision.”

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 most
correct 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 help
and discuss business.
There is a local group of translators that meets quarterly for a potluck lunch, so there
are opportunities for interaction with other professionals. I get out to such meetings
about 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 program
suffers 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 your
computer?

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 say
so!)»

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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 highest
properties/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 life
more complicated and costing me big bucks to keep up with all the new technological
changes.”

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 week
Count: 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 a
74% 21%
translator?

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 you
could 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 floppy
disk, 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 send
the 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 very
vulnerable 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 you
would like to know the answer but you have to wait for the project manager to come in
at the office, which will only happen when it’s almost the end of the day in your part of
the globe.”
~
“Many phone calls, late evening for me because of the time difference, and not always
meaningful”

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 as
42.7 hrs. 17.3
translator?
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
13
During the traditional office hours (around 9am to 5pm) 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 during
day/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 DESIRED
workload?
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 indicate
working hours, even if ever less respected as such. The 8:30-18:30 aims to represent the office hours in
a 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 people
marked 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 on
balance, 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 translation
agency?
8 Likert scales followed (see attachment 2):

Translation rates Most Very Fairly Less Least

important important important important important

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.

104
 Values according to subcontractors

21

14

0
Most important Very important Fairly important Less important Least important

Translation rates Reliability in payments

Clarity of the assignments Availability for questions
Interpersonal relationship with agency's people Punctuality in payments
Loyalty 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?
105

105
106
 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 to
the 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 you
thought that the relationship was not going anywhere and even if the translator was
good in quality, you just decided that he was not good enough to be used again?

108
 HILKE: NO, because a personal relationship is something different from a business
relationship, and if somebody is doing a good job, on time at a reasonable price, it
doesn’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 or
influential the good or bad relationship, just, really on a personal level, can be for the
final result?
HILKE: Actually I think that the Project Manager has to be fairly diplomatic and try to
maintain a good relationship with the Subcontractor, because with a bad relationship
you 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 I
liked 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 a
relationship 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

109
 communicate at all well and he didn’t read my emails properly: he just saw them quick
and so he did the wrong things… because it took only 5 minutes to read the coversheet
and the instructions and I was trying get back to him, you know, about a problem, and
he 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 good
translator, but if doesn’t read the emails, than is not gonna do the right jobs, that’s the
point.”

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: good
communication 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 know
the person you’re working with through the project, he has to be honest, do not change
the 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

110
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

111
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 when
communicating via e-mails.”
~
“I don’t like... telecommunications itches, long waits, having to convince people of a
point 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 (French
1 3
Canadian mother tongue)
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 dual
1 3
citizenship
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 States
write 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 tongue
included)?
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 country
different 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

114
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” you
personally experienced 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!”)
Oh yes, like that time…

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 from
Latin 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 to
part with the electronic file. I find this infathomable. I cannot understand this
reasoning and it makes the job of the translator very difficult and for no good reason. I
also 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, disregarding
their 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 you
will 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

115
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 cultural
background and the communication via computer (email and such...)? How do
you 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 tool
to 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 personable
cultures tend to write more flowery and personal emails. People from emotional
cultures 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 to
be talkative and to say too many things because of my cultural, Caribbean
background.”

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:

116
 “Often a letter to my friends in Cuba or Spain (or even to my Latino friends in the
States) contains at least two paragraphs, while a letter to my American friends is just a
short 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 personal
basis. As I said earlier, having a presence on the Internet makes both translators and
agencies feel more comfortable without their ever having met. For me this has made it
possible to foster professional relationships more easily than 10 years ago. With the
greater diffusion of teleconferencing etc., it seems as though this trend will continue
until a flesh-and-blood, face-to-face meeting becomes moot. Culturally, I’m not sure
what 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 in
the 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 thanks
to 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:

117
 “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 man
looks at it and says: «This is not an elephant». A little later, the elephant turns around
and slowly goes away. At this point the wise man wonders whether by any chance there
is an elephant nearby. At last, the elephant is gone. When it is definitely out of sight, the
wise man sees the footprints it has left and with certainty declares: «Here there was an
elephant».
(…)
The meaning we give to this tale is that the elephant, like the cultural dimension, is
really invisible if you do not know what to look at, while is becomes overhanging like a
mountain 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, but
more importantly, it’s a great leveller, it connects people through a common cultural
currency, albeit a currency spread by words and images on a screen: for example, good
work earns respect everywhere. In this way, work has become an important common
meeting ground for people from different cultures and colours and races, and that
computer-mediated communication is important to start, spread, and sustain a growing
global 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 it
gives 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

118
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.

119
120
 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.

121
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 unequally
distributed.

122
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 more
general flexibilization of work, should lead to a widespread work autonomization, that
is to say a springing up of freelance professionals. These subjects, working with several
companies simultaneously will compensate the lack of identification typical of
dependent employees, building up consortia recalling middle age guilds. Differently
from those, that were local, these will be transnational, and therefore hardly insertable
in a specific juridical order, since they will require a counterpart with similar
characteristics of virtualness and transnationality. Thus in this domain we foresee the
same legal problem we are dealing with nowadays in the e-commerce juridical
regulation, in which national laws wear thin and crack under the globalization
pressure.

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
123
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.

124
 Appendix

Attachment 1. Email message inviting to participate to the websurvey.

Subject: VD Survey 2000
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 21:55:06 +0100
From: Survey <survey@VD.com>
Reply-To: paolo@VD.com
Organization: VD, Inc.
To: survey@VD.com
BCC: <all Subcontractors’ email addresses>

Hello Dear Collaborator,

I would like to introduce you to Paolo Brunello who is helping us to establish a flawless
communication with you and with your colleague translators working with us from all over
the world.
Paolo is a graduate student from Italy, performing a research study at VD (formerly
Sputnik 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 through
computer mediated communication in a Virtual Organization”.
2. VD realized that this research was extremely relevant to the improvement of our
collaborative working practices: we realize that we do not know much about you and your
working conditions, and we would like to expand our knowledge in order to improve our
relationship with you as a collaborating Subcontractor.

This is the first scientific research project specifically focused on freelance teleworking
translators.

To do this, we have prepared an online survey that uses a web interface, which will make
everything as user-friendly and quick as possible.

We plan to process your answers next Monday, but if you could fill this questionnaire
sooner, it will be most
appreciated.

REMEMBER, ALL THE INFORMATION YOU WILL PROVIDE US WITH WILL BE

STRICTLY
CONFIDENTIAL AND WILL BE ANALYZED COLLECTIVELY AS AGGREGATE:
IT WILL NOT BE
ASSOCIATED TO YOUR NAME AS A SPECIFIC RESPONDENT (In OTHER
WORDS IT IS

125
WORDS IT IS
ANONYMOUS).

As you can see, your address does not appear in the heading to protect your privacy with
regards to the other
recipients of this message.

Immediately after you complete the online questionnaire, you will be able to see the results
collected so far.

You can decide to skip certain questions if you don’t feel comfortable answering them, but
we would heartily
appreciate your effort to answer.

IF YOU DECIDE NOT TO ANSWER THE ONLINE QUESTIONNAIRE AT ALL OR

TO QUIT IT BEFORE
FINISHING, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE TELL US WHY BY REPLYING TO THIS
EMAIL.

IF, WHILE ANSWERING, YOU ENCOUNTER ANY TECHNICAL PROBLEM, WE

ENCOURAGE YOU TO REPORT IT BY REPLYING TO THIS EMAIL.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Natasha <last name>

General Manager
VD, Inc.
www.VD.com

Paolo Brunello
Intern at VD, Inc.
Exchange Graduate Student
Communication Dept., University of California, San Diego
and
Work 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 into
your browser)

Thank you again!

126
Attachment 2. Websurvey.
<IMAGE: LOGO VD>

Welcome!

Answering the following questions should require anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes, depending on your
answers, BUT MUST BE DONE ALL AT ONCE FOR THE DATA TO BE VALID. You cannot create
a bookmark/favorite, nor save the answers.

Please, DO NOT click on the back button of your browser — unless it’s specifically requested: if you do
so, your answers will be invalid. (For the same reason, all links to our website have been disabled, but
you 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 be
skipped, but please don’t quit the survey: Not only will you miss the chance to participate in the first
research 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 answered
so 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 more
If your answer is “2 or more” PLEASE CHOOSE THE ONE YOU USE MOST OF THE TIMES, AND
REFER ONLY TO THAT ONE WHILE ANSWERING THE WHOLE QUESTIONNAIRE
How 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
Office
University
It varies so much that I can’t tell
Other location

On average, how many hours per week do you spend connected?

127
 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 to
pay)
Semi-flat (You buy from your ISP a certain number of connection hours in advance and if you exceed
them 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 you
connect 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 and
such)?
Yes
No
I 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 “Track
changes” feature?
Yes, often
Yes, sometimes
Yes, rarely
No, never
I 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?

128
 I use it when…

Continue...

Page 2/8
What kind of multimedia devices do you have available on your computer?
Microphone
Full duplex audio card
Webcam
None 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
Good
Very good
Excellent

How do you usually troubleshoot computer related problems?

I usually…

Now we are going to ask you some questions about your profession as a translator: please answer
in general, DO NOT refer exclusively to your working relationship with VD

What are the advantages of your job?

129
 The pros are…

What are the disadvantages of your job?

The cons are…

To be a translator is:
My one and only job
My primary but not only job
My secondary job
An 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 out
the differences on the job between now and then:-)

!
Let’s turn to your specific job characteristics...

130
 ”Teleworking”
(i. e. working with people 1 2 3 4 5
far away from you, using Personal Necessity
your computer to Choice
communicate with them)
for you is more of a:

Can you expand on this? What do you like about “teleworking”?

I like…

...And what do you dislike or find hard to do?

I don’t like…

Are you currently working more or less than your DESIRED workload?
More
Less
The 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, sometimes
No, not really
If you would like to add something about this topic, you can do so here:

Continue...

Page 2/8

131
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 a
period equal or longer than 6 months?
Yes
No

Stop and reflect for a second: could you tell us about some “culture shocks” you personally
experienced 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!”)

Oh yes, like that time…

Continue...

Page 4/8

By completing this survey you gain the right to receive a free copy of the full report of this
research: would you like us to send it to your email address?
Yes, please
No, I don’t care

132
 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 I

PERSONALLY 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 Translation
Services)
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 year
It 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/him
Well, 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...

133
Page 6/8
What kind of media do you use to communicate with VD?

Email
Most often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

Phone
Most often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

Fax
Most often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

eFax and such

Most often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

Person
Most often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

Regular mail
Most 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 you
give up because the communication constraints make the effort not worthwhile?
Most often
Often
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 big
The 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 issues
None o Problemi di compatibilità PC/Mac f the above
Other problems like the ones I specified below:

134
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 directive
I 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 VD
Subcontractors)?
Yes
No

Continue...

Page 6a/8
What kind of media do you use to communicate with them?

Email
Most often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

Chat/Instant
Messenger Most often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

Phone
Most often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

Fax
Most often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

135
 eFax and such
Most often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

Person
Most often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

Regular mail
Most often Often Sometimes Rarely Never

[For my scientific purposes, I would like to investigate this topic further: if you are available for a
short phone interview (to be scheduled at your convenience), or a chat or at least a personal email
exchange, please write your email address below. I might contact you.

BY NO MEANS WILL YOUR ADDRESS BE DISCLOSED TO ANYONE ELSE, AND I

PERSONALLY GUARANTEE THAT VD WILL NOT ASSOCIATE IT WITH YOUR ANSWERS.

- Paolo Brunello]

Continue...

Page 7/8
Besides 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 translation
agency?

Translation rates
Most Very Fairly Less Least
important important important important important

Reliability in
payments Most Very Fairly Less Least
important important important important important

Clarity of the
assignments Most Very Fairly Less Least
important important important important important

136
 Availability for
questions Most Very Fairly Less Least
important important important important important

Interpersonal
relationship with the Most Very Fairly Less Least
agency’s people important important important important important

Punctuality in
payments Most Very Fairly Less Least
important important important important important

Loyalty to you
Most Very Fairly Less Least
important important important important important

Professionalism
Most Very Fairly Less Least
important important important important important

Other:

Your “Other”
Most Very Fairly Less Least
important important important important important

Continue...

Page 8/8
What are your favorite computer-based translation tools?

Links (online dictionaries, directories, databases, etc.):

Software (specific for translation):

137
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 below
My 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 engine
Through 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 the
communication via computer (email and such...)? How do you think they influence each other?

138
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!

NOW
BE SURE
TO CLICK
ON THE
RIGHT BUTTON (submit)!

reset submit

139
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

140
Attachment 4. Frequencies and percentages of all the answers to multiple
choice questions as they appear in the order they were asked.
SAMPLE SIZE: 36
ITEM: 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.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
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

141
 ITEM: What kind of Internet access do you use most of the times?
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
total
Unanswered 0 0.00
Free (or paid by advertising banners) 0 0.00
Flat (You pay a fixed fee to your
Internet Service Provider [=ISP] and 25 69.44
you don’t have phone fees to pay)
Semi-flat (You buy from your ISP a
certain number of connection hours
2 5.56
in advance and if you exceed them
you have to pay an extra fee)
Freeserve (You don’t pay any
subscription fee to your ISP, but you
0 0.00
pay the phone fees when you connect
to it)
Combo (You pay a subscription fee
to your ISP and also the phone fees 9 25.00
when you connect to it)
Other 0 0.00

ITEM: Can you read HTML e-mails (containing formatted text, pictures, clickable links)?
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
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

142
 ITEM: When you use your wordprocessor software (i. e. Microsoft Word), do you utilize the
“Track changes” feature?
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
total
Unanswered 0 0.00
Basic 6 16.67
Good 12 33.33
Very good 11 30.56
Excellent 7 19.44

143
 ITEM: To be a translator is:
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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.
count
Option

Very early in the morning (around 5am to 9am) 6

During the traditional office hours (around 9am to
15
5pm)
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.
count %
Option
total
Unanswered 0 0.00
Yes, most of the times 18 50.00
Sometimes 13 36.11
No, only exceptionally 5 13.89

144
 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.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
total
Unanswered 0 0.00
Yes, most of the times 29 80.56
No, generally not 5 13.89
It varies 2 5.56

145
 ITEM: Do you miss the direct interaction with other people?
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
total
Unanswered 0 0.00
US 9 25.00
Canadian from the Province of Quebec (French Canadian
1 2.78
mother tongue)
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 dual
1 2.78
citizenship
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

146
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.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
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 homeland
for a period equal or longer than 6 months?
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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 this
research: would you like us to send it to your email address?

147
 COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
total
Unanswered 6 17
Yes, I’d really like to meet her/him 10 28
Well, sometimes I thought about it, but I can live
16 44
without it
No, honestly I don’t feel such a need to meet
4 11
her/him

148
 ITEM: Have you ever wanted to know how she/he looks like?
COUNT: 30/36 responded.
count %
Option
total
Unanswered 6 17
Yes, I’d really like to see her/his face 9 25
Well, sometimes I thought about it, but I can
18 50
live without it
No, honestly I don’t feel such a need to see
3 8
her/him

What kind of media do you use to communicate with VD?

ITEM: Email
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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: Phone
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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: Fax
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
total
Unanswered 0 0.00

149
 Most often 0 0.00
Often 5 13.89
Sometimes 17 47.22
Rarely 8 22.22
Never 6 16.67

ITEM: eFax and such

COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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: Person
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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

150
 ITEM: Regular mail
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
total
Unreadable attachments/file formats 4 11.11
The file is too big 0 0.00
The technical requirements for working
0 0.00
with us are too high
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 specified
4 11.11
below:

151
 ITEM: What kind of relational problems do you most commonly encounter when working with
us?
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
total
Scarce availability of the Project Manager 0 0.00
Poor organization/coordination or unclear
2 5.56
assignments
The Project Manager has a mentality very
1 2.78
different from mine
Coldness, unfriendlyness 1 2.78
Lack of information about the context of
0 0.00
use of the document to be translated
The Project Manager is too directive 0 0.00
I wish I could have more feedback about
3 8.33
my job
The Project Manager is too demanding (in
1 2.78
terms of time pressure, price, etc.)
None of the above 30 83.33
Misunderstandings like the ones I
0 0.00
specified below:

ITEM: Do you have a personal network of translators you collaborate with (not necessarily other
VD Subcontractors)?
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
total
Unanswered 0 0.00
Yes 18 50.00
No 18 50.00

152
 What kind of media do you use to communicate with them?
ITEM: Email
COUNT: 18/36 responded.
count %
Option
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 Messenger

COUNT: 18/36 responded.
count %
Option
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: Phone
COUNT: 18/36 responded.
count %
Option
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

153
 ITEM: Fax
COUNT: 18/36 responded.
count %
Option
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 such

COUNT: 18/36 responded.
Coun %
Option
t 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: Person
COUNT: 18/36 responded.
count %
Option
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

154
 ITEM: Regular mail
COUNT: 18/36 responded.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
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 translation
agency?
ITEM: Translation rates
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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

155
 ITEM: Reliability in payments
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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 assignments

COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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 questions

COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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

156
 ITEM: Interpersonal relationship with the agency’s people
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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 payments

COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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 you

COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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

157
 ITEM: Professionalism
COUNT: 36/36 responded.
count %
Option
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.
count %
Option
total
Unanswered 7 19.44
Yes 22 61.11
No 6 16.67
Yes, but only if under certain
1 2.78
conditions that I specify below

ITEM: How did you find out about your Internet-based translation tools?
COUNT: 29/36 responded.
count %
Option
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,
4 11.11
newspaper/magazine ads, radio ads, etc.)
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

158
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