METM16 presentation 


How to reduce anxiety and improve quality by using checklists  

Marco Neves, Lisbon, Portugal 

Checklists are used extensively in the aviation industry and increasingly in medicine to avoid costly mistakes. Editors and translators could profit from understanding the principles of good checklists in order to reduce anxiety and improve the quality of our work.
 
My presentation will start by explaining why it is so difficult to follow instructions and be careful in our work. Checklists are just one of many tools created to help us overcome the natural sloppiness of human beings. 
 
Then, I will present some examples of checklists in the aviation and medical industries as a solution to our own limitations and will show how we can use good practices in aviation and medicine to improve our work as editors and translators. 
 
I will propose some guidelines to create a good checklist system for editors and translators. This will include ideas about how to integrate checklists into our daily work, our file systems and also, for those of us who use them, how to use checklists inside CAT tools. The presentation will be focused on how to make sure each of us follow complex instructions and also keep in mind basic, important steps. I will suggest free tools to create simple, beautiful checklists that we will actually use and will present templates that can be reused by any editor and translator interested in saving brainpower and improving quality.


Marco Neves is the manager of Eurologos-Lisboa. He has been a translator since 2002 and, since 2011, a university lecturer on translation, project management and translation technology at NOVA University of Lisbon. He is also president of the Portuguese Association of Translation Companies and a published author on linguistic matters.