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Post by shanshan310 on Jun 20, 2017 17:10:36 GMT 9
Does anyone have any ideas about breaking into new areas at work?
I would specifically like to get more involved with my office’s BOE. We currently have 4 ALTs, and while I interact with their supervisor a lot I don’t really interact with the rest of the department much. Apparently the CIR here hasn’t been getting any requests from schools etc since the fourth ALT was added, so they don’t have a lot for me to do that isn’t dealing with the ALTs directly. BUT we do have a new sister school agreement with a school in my home country, and I am really keen to help with stuff in that area. My preds worked a fair bit on it, and I have a bunch of new ideas too. There are a group of kids from here and there doing an exchange and the mayor and some office people are going over later in the year to cement things, and again my preds worked helping the mayor and kids with prep and interpreting etc. So I assumed I would be fairly involved too. I haven’t been at all though, and since the sister school is quite close to where I grew up I feel like it’s kind of a waste for me not to be.
My initial plan was ‘wait until I get a request from them’ because I was sure they would contact me as most other groups have, but since that wasn’t really working I decided to try and be more proactive about offering to help. My supervisor thinks my involvement sounds like a great idea but he also doesn’t interact with the BOE and sending my ideas to the ALT supervisor (my supervisor’s advice) has not really been going anywhere.
Should I be more direct about offering? Should I just leave it? I’m not sure if my help isn’t wanted or needed, but surely they know I exist right?
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Post by ザ・penguin54 on Jun 20, 2017 18:45:18 GMT 9
I suggest being more direct. In my experience you'd be surprised how passive people can be even if they know about you.
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Post by CaptainSeery on Jun 21, 2017 8:42:25 GMT 9
I ditto what ザ・penguin54 said. You often have to be very proactive for people to take advantage of your offer. I think it's a matter of "bringing in this person who doesn't work right next to us is annoying, and we have to get permission from various people which is annoying, even though once that initial annoying period is over, that person can help us a lot and more than balance out the annoyingness." But that first period of getting permission (from your kacho and from higher-ups in the BoE, etc) is still annoying and so it just doesn't happen unless you push. |
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Post by Cantamen on Aug 9, 2017 16:09:05 GMT 9
So I was looking over the "Things to do when you first arrive" post again, and thought I'd have a look-see at the city's website.
"This site is the official website of the municipality Long Fields, Japan.
This site is for you to know Long Fields to foreign visitors, English, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Thai, set up a wiki page in Tagalog, has introduced a translation service for the entire site and The.
Long Fields City home page, using the translation service free translation of external sites.
Will be translated into a machine, there might not have the right translation. Even with the accuracy of translation errors, etc., in Long Fields, so I can not bear any responsibility for, Please note."
Then there's a button that takes you to google translate.
How do I tell them they need my help without sounding rude? I have no work right now and clearly this could use improvement.
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Post by shanshan310 on Aug 14, 2017 9:49:37 GMT 9
Hmmm, well since it was done by an automated and outsourced program, you probably don’t need to be as gentle as you would otherwise. There’s no chance anyone you know wrote it… although I guess they could have approved the job being done. I’d bring it up with your supervisor that some of it is a little bit difficult to understand because auto translation tech isn’t totally there yet and that you’ve got the time to fix it.
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Post by Hokuto on Aug 15, 2017 9:21:48 GMT 9
CantamenYeah i agree with shanshan310 as long as it was an automated translation, i would say you should go up and (of course very politely) tell them that you noticed that the website uses Google translate but that it is extremely hard to understand. it's hard to do this stuff at the beginning of your job, but it helps to remember that this literally is your job, and stuff like this (usually) should fall under your domain. it's also kind of embarrassing to have something like that on a website for a city/prefecture that you are working for, especially when we often are seen as the people who have to handle all of the English communication. that's honestly what drives me to push back at my soup when she tries to "correct" my English, because i don't want to have my name attached to anything bad like that, even if it's a small thing.
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Post by manjuっすけ on May 12, 2022 14:12:53 GMT 9
This seemed like the best thread to ask my question in so i'm resurrecting it
I was looking at a past post I made about lack of work and the responses i got. One piece of advice that got mentioned is reaching out to other departments for work, which honestly did and still does feel intimidating but I want to give it a shot. There was one person in the BOE who got idoued to 観光商工 so i was thinking about reaching out to him since we're not total strangers at least. But (dumb question) I don't really know what I should say? "Hello, if you need anything translated please feel free to contact me or soup N-san?" ka na
edit: also does it look better if i write up like a proposal and also hand that in when i talk to the person? or not really?
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num05410
So jozu at chopsticks
Posts: 139
CIR Experience: 3rd year
Location: Iwate
Gender (Pronouns): meh. whatever
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Post by num05410 on May 27, 2022 8:54:18 GMT 9
This seemed like the best thread to ask my question in so i'm resurrecting it I was looking at a past post I made about lack of work and the responses i got. One piece of advice that got mentioned is reaching out to other departments for work, which honestly did and still does feel intimidating but I want to give it a shot. There was one person in the BOE who got idoued to 観光商工 so i was thinking about reaching out to him since we're not total strangers at least. But (dumb question) I don't really know what I should say? "Hello, if you need anything translated please feel free to contact me or soup N-san?" ka na edit: also does it look better if i write up like a proposal and also hand that in when i talk to the person? or not really?
I cant say for sure that this is the best way or anything, but I think things will move faster if you have a specific thing you want to translate or a specific thing you want to get involved in. That way you're not just throwing flyers for someone to pickup, but its more personal and direct imo.
I was walking around the city hall one day and happened to find a garbage disposal flyer that had Japanese and English, but was.. lets just say not the best, so asked my soup first to see who's incharge of it, asked my Jicho if I can reach out, who then reached out to the dept. and confirmed who the tanto was. Later, I called the tanto to ask if I can re-translate the flyer since its really hard to read.
As for the proposal, i think it really depends on the scale of the work. Although having one will probably help in the long run, since its easier for people to see what they can expect. I did need to make a 起案書 to start with English menu translation in the local restaurants, but i feel it was also because its work outside of the City Hall.
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Post by manjuっすけ on May 28, 2022 8:39:29 GMT 9
This seemed like the best thread to ask my question in so i'm resurrecting it I was looking at a past post I made about lack of work and the responses i got. One piece of advice that got mentioned is reaching out to other departments for work, which honestly did and still does feel intimidating but I want to give it a shot. There was one person in the BOE who got idoued to 観光商工 so i was thinking about reaching out to him since we're not total strangers at least. But (dumb question) I don't really know what I should say? "Hello, if you need anything translated please feel free to contact me or soup N-san?" ka na edit: also does it look better if i write up like a proposal and also hand that in when i talk to the person? or not really?
I cant say for sure that this is the best way or anything, but I think things will move faster if you have a specific thing you want to translate or a specific thing you want to get involved in. That way you're not just throwing flyers for someone to pickup, but its more personal and direct imo.
I was walking around the city hall one day and happened to find a garbage disposal flyer that had Japanese and English, but was.. lets just say not the best, so asked my soup first to see who's incharge of it, asked my Jicho if I can reach out, who then reached out to the dept. and confirmed who the tanto was. Later, I called the tanto to ask if I can re-translate the flyer since its really hard to read.
As for the proposal, i think it really depends on the scale of the work. Although having one will probably help in the long run, since its easier for people to see what they can expect. I did need to make a 起案書 to start with English menu translation in the local restaurants, but i feel it was also because its work outside of the City Hall.
Thanks for your response! Yeah I did get similar advice from another person so I pinpointed specific things (the tourism facebook page, and the corona updates on the homepage) and made mock ups of what my idea would look like and gave them to kakarichou. I’m probably gonna have to follow up a lot though since translation isn’t something CIRs in my position have done |
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num05410
So jozu at chopsticks
Posts: 139
CIR Experience: 3rd year
Location: Iwate
Gender (Pronouns): meh. whatever
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Post by num05410 on May 30, 2022 8:47:05 GMT 9
I cant say for sure that this is the best way or anything, but I think things will move faster if you have a specific thing you want to translate or a specific thing you want to get involved in. That way you're not just throwing flyers for someone to pickup, but its more personal and direct imo.
I was walking around the city hall one day and happened to find a garbage disposal flyer that had Japanese and English, but was.. lets just say not the best, so asked my soup first to see who's incharge of it, asked my Jicho if I can reach out, who then reached out to the dept. and confirmed who the tanto was. Later, I called the tanto to ask if I can re-translate the flyer since its really hard to read.
As for the proposal, i think it really depends on the scale of the work. Although having one will probably help in the long run, since its easier for people to see what they can expect. I did need to make a 起案書 to start with English menu translation in the local restaurants, but i feel it was also because its work outside of the City Hall.
Thanks for your response! Yeah I did get similar advice from another person so I pinpointed specific things (the tourism facebook page, and the corona updates on the homepage) and made mock ups of what my idea would look like and gave them to kakarichou. I’m probably gonna have to follow up a lot though since translation isn’t something CIRs in my position have done Nice! Yeah, with a lot of my translation work I tried to tie it together to my tourism dept. by saying that its related to Inbound. But they always say, 'Oh but what if this leads you to getting more and more translation requests and you aren't able to do your daily work..' so having some kind of reponse to that might help? hue Good luck! |
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Post by manjuっすけ on May 30, 2022 9:34:45 GMT 9
Thanks for your response! Yeah I did get similar advice from another person so I pinpointed specific things (the tourism facebook page, and the corona updates on the homepage) and made mock ups of what my idea would look like and gave them to kakarichou. I’m probably gonna have to follow up a lot though since translation isn’t something CIRs in my position have done Nice! Yeah, with a lot of my translation work I tried to tie it together to my tourism dept. by saying that its related to Inbound. But they always say, 'Oh but what if this leads you to getting more and more translation requests and you aren't able to do your daily work..' so having some kind of reponse to that might help? hue Good luck! Thanks! Outside of planning for english classes and the monthly kouhou article I don't have regular work so I hope that'll make it an easier sell |
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num05410
So jozu at chopsticks
Posts: 139
CIR Experience: 3rd year
Location: Iwate
Gender (Pronouns): meh. whatever
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Post by num05410 on May 30, 2022 9:59:57 GMT 9
Nice! Yeah, with a lot of my translation work I tried to tie it together to my tourism dept. by saying that its related to Inbound. But they always say, 'Oh but what if this leads you to getting more and more translation requests and you aren't able to do your daily work..' so having some kind of reponse to that might help? hue Good luck! Thanks! Outside of planning for english classes and the monthly kouhou article I don't have regular work so I hope that'll make it an easier sell eyyy, i write them monthly kouhou ariticles too!! I write like a page worth and they always cut it down to like 1/4 or even less.. but its work regardless!
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