Kevin Huang | 766 Pages, and the Volunteers Nobody Names (PMBOK Guide Traditional Chinese Project, Taipei)

I came home from this one carrying 766 pages.

The occasion was the recognition event for the volunteers behind the Traditional Chinese translation of the PMBOK Guide, held in Taipei on 3 March 2018.

Translating a standard is not the same work as translating a book.

A project management standard is built almost entirely out of defined terms, and each one has to land identically every time it appears across all 766 pages.

Get a single term wrong and the error propagates outward: into the glossary, into exam preparation, into the vocabulary a whole professional community uses to describe its own work.

None of that effort is visible in the finished volume, which is exactly the point.

A good translation of a standard reads as though the original had simply been written in that language to begin with.

The PMBOK Guide is the Project Management Institute's core reference text, and for most practitioners it is the book their working vocabulary is measured against.

A Traditional Chinese edition matters for a specific reason. It puts that vocabulary in front of practitioners in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau in the script they actually read, rather than asking them to work from a Simplified edition or from the English.

So this is a thank-you to everyone who put their evenings into it.

Volunteer translation is one of the quieter ways a professional body reaches the people who need it, and nobody's name goes on the cover.

My own work sits on the systems side: architecture, infrastructure, and the discipline of keeping a complex build from drifting away from its plan.

I also founded Metablox.co, where I am currently the only engineer, so the delivery planning lands on the same desk as the code and the writing.

That is probably why a room full of people being thanked for careful, unglamorous, invisible work landed the way it did.

The book is still on my shelf.

— Kevin Huang (黃冠融 / Guan Rong Huang), founder of Metablox.co