Collective Farm Book

Probably, some have heard the declared large construction of roads in 2020 in Ukraine. But we could not even imagine to become the cornerstone partner for the participation in the tender of one of the major road construction companies.

Once, lovely representatives of this company dumped a mountain of work books in our office asking to translate them from Russian into Ukrainian. At first glance, nothing complicated, it could even seem like an absolute “freebie," but for the money. But this, if you never delve into the subject. After all, many work books were started in the days of the Soviet Union; for many, the beginning of labor activity was recorded in the Book of the Collective Farmer. Can you imagine the quality of records, seals? So, we could not imagine this too. And the deadlines were completely impossible for us: to be in time, we had to work from morning till night, including weekends.

In addition, the customers turned out to be very careful: the first two days they were staying in our office looking through every translation themselves ... Despite the fact that many of the notes were in Ukrainian, we re-typed them, because the extract from the document did not fit, the translation had to contain the entire text of the work book, plus the decryption of the seals, plus the translation of the form of the document itself. Thus, the volume of one work book sometimes amounted to more than 10 translation pages!

While we were saving the customer, who was convincing that money was not a problem, just, please, do everything on time, we could not even imagine that the result of 5-day work of 8 employees would be more than 450 translation pages, plus notarization of each translation.

The customer also did not expect such numbers, and the resulting total cost was finally a problem. After several days of negociations and approvals, we came to a mutually beneficial compromise, and a week later we received another batch of those books from them.