| Pages in topic: [1 2 3 4] > | Poll: What is your average daily capacity for translation? Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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| | | 2,000-3,000 words | Apr 27, 2022 |
I tell clients 2,000-2,500, though I consider 3,000 words per day quite feasible and a comfortable task, editing included, and now and then I’ve done much more than that. Everything depends on the subject matter, format, etc. and on my mood and brain...
| | | | | It also depends on your source language | Apr 27, 2022 |
-- or which language you use to count words.
If you consistently count source words and target words of your translations you will probably see a regular pattern in the difference. Over large numbers of texts, the difference in my language pair is often around 20 % or more. I never promise in advance to translate more than 2000 words a day, and I find 10 000 words in a week is hard work in most subject areas.
| | | | | Can't pay the rent with 3,000 words | Apr 27, 2022 |
6,000 - 8,000, depending on the difficulty of the texts, and how many hours I can work that day.
[Edited at 2022-04-27 09:04 GMT]
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Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 16:54
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
| 4500 words to be exactly. | Apr 27, 2022 |
My daily capacity is 4500 (new) translation words. Obviously my working days are, on average, not exactly 9 tot 5. I often quit around 10:30 PM. Sometimes I manage to have the job done by 4:30 PM, sometimes I work until (far) past midnight. It depends of course on the type of text. To put things in perspective: I'm also the cook at home and responsible for the kitchen, so most of the time I don't work between 4:30 PM and 7 PM.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 16:54
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Justin Peterson wrote:
6,000 - 8,000, depending on the difficulty of the texts, and how many hours I can work that day.
[Edited at 2022-04-27 09:04 GMT]
I suppose you're using machine translation then ? 8000 words a day for normal translation (with a certain degree of quality) seems physically impossible to me.
| | | | | 2,000 words without headache after that | Apr 27, 2022 |
but 3 months ago I finished a project where I had to translate 5,000 words a day and more, every day, about 40 days in a row — and no machine translation was used; some circumstances didn't let me start work at the right time and then I couldn't already ask the manager the change the deadline so I had to hurry and do my best. Thanks God, I managed to do it. But I promised myself never to repeat things like that anymore.
| | | | neilmac
Spain
Local time: 16:54
Spanish to English
+ ...
Around 2000 words is about average, and what I usually tell clients. However, circumstances can affect this, for example the complexity or format of the text, the number of other projects I may be working on at the same time with similar deadlines, or even simply non-translation-related life events that can interfere with my working time, for example admin problems, vehicle issues,... in fact, life, the universe and everything.
Formatting issues can be a pain. For example, many jour... See more Around 2000 words is about average, and what I usually tell clients. However, circumstances can affect this, for example the complexity or format of the text, the number of other projects I may be working on at the same time with similar deadlines, or even simply non-translation-related life events that can interfere with my working time, for example admin problems, vehicle issues,... in fact, life, the universe and everything.
Formatting issues can be a pain. For example, many journals expect their contributing authors to use a template when submitting their articles for publication. Some aspects of these templates can cause conflict with CAT tools. One current bugbear of mine is equations. This morning, I was getting along fine with an urgent translation due for the weekend, until I got about halfway through and there was an equation, which caused my document to crash. I'm now having to employ a workaround which will add about an hour extra onto the time I would normally take to finish this translation. I'll tell the client, before I deliver the draft, that I'm going to charge for this inconvenience. And I've just altered my terms and conditions to ask my clients to refrain from sending me texts for with equations in them (I've already done this with regard to templates). They can insert their equations a posteriori, and paste the translated text into the templates instead. I find that once they understand this kind of thing, they are usually happy to comply. ▲ Collapse
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| A combination, of course | Apr 27, 2022 |
Lieven Malaise wrote:
Justin Peterson wrote:
6,000 - 8,000, depending on the difficulty of the texts, and how many hours I can work that day.
[Edited at 2022-04-27 09:04 GMT]
I suppose you're using machine translation then ? 8000 words a day for normal translation (with a certain degree of quality) seems physically impossible to me.
Of course. Is anyone NOT using MT in the year 2022?
I use MT for suggested translations, and use either all of it, if it's good, or none of it, if it's trash.
This, after reading the document, and then doing a thorough proofread at the end, of course.
To each his own, but I cannot imagine how anyone can afford to not use MT today.
Not doing so reduces your productivity, dramatically.
Of course, on some projects, I don't even bother (the novels I have translated, for example, in which case the massive volume offsets the drawback of not being able to use MT)
I see no advantage to "manually" translating texts, unless they are so subjective, complex, poetic or rich in style that they require this.
Generally speaking, save for these cases, it does not increase your quality. It just slows you down and exhausts you.
Are people, for example, really manually translating lists of countries, for example? (!) Or retranslating exact sentences they have done many times before? ETC. Why?
[Edited at 2022-04-27 10:08 GMT]
| | | | Dan Lucas 
United Kingdom
Local time: 15:54
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
Justin Peterson wrote:
Are people, for example, really manually translating lists of countries, for example? (!) Or retranslating exact sentences they have done many times before?
Hmm...!
First, my clients would usually pick up that sort of thing in their preliminary scan, lock the segments in question and deal with them themselves. But if they don't lock them then they pay my full rate for me to translate them, which is fine by me. I don't charge by the hour.
The second is that if your rate is low enough that the efficiency with which you translate lists of high-frequency proper nouns becomes a crucial part of the equation, perhaps the rate is the overarching problem?
The third is that - and personally I have no objection to people using MT or any other tool provided that their clients understand and accept the issues - are you perhaps confusing MT with CAT?
I ask because a decent CAT tool with appropriate translation memory and termbase will do the above (lists, identical sentences) for you, without needing to resort to Google Translate or some other MT system. Also, the TM and TB will usually be tailored to your client's particular context.
To return to the poll, for material with which I'm familiar I can translate about 1,000 characters an hour, which is generally about 500 English words. At a push I can therefore complete 8,000 characters a day, but it's hard to sustain concentration and motivation that long.
Dan
[Edited at 2022-04-27 11:58 GMT]
| | | | Baran Keki
Türkiye
Local time: 18:54
Member
English to Turkish
| Possibilities | Apr 27, 2022 |
Lieven Malaise wrote:
8000 words a day for normal translation (with a certain degree of quality) seems physically impossible to me.
I often find it 'impossible' to get work that amounts to 8000 words on a weekly basis.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 16:54
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Justin Peterson wrote:
Of course. Is anyone NOT using MT in the year 2022?
I work almost exclusively for translation agencies who work wit the CAT tool SDL Trados Studio. In general they forbid you to use MT and in the cases they allow it, they send you a pre-translated file to be post-edited (at a post-editing rate, obviously). That doesn't mean that I don't use MT for translation, but I use it in an indirect way that, although it still allows me to speed up the translation process, definitely doesn't allow me to be able to reach 8000 words a day.
For proper MTPE assignments my maximum number of words is about 6000-7000 words a day.
Justin Peterson wrote:
To each his own, but I cannot imagine how anyone can afford to not use MT today.
Not doing so reduces your productivity, dramatically.
Agreed, although I would put it otherwise: 'Doing so, increases your productivity dramatically'.
I would even go further: MT made me a better translator. The Auto Suggest feature offers me suggestions I would normally not think about. It's really an amazing technology and you can better embrace it to get the most out of it, because it's here to stay and further influence our profession.
[Edited at 2022-04-27 13:56 GMT]
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Kay Denney
France
Local time: 16:54
French to English
Justin Peterson wrote:
Is anyone NOT using MT in the year 2022?
Are people, for example, really manually translating lists of countries, for example? (!) Or retranslating exact sentences they have done many times before? ETC. Why?
I don't use MT. I translate mainly for the arts, blurb about upcoming exhibitions, sleeve notes for CDs (yes they still exist), press releases about upcoming events, biographies of artists.
Basically, not the stuff that MT will be helpful for.
If you have to read what MT comes up with, decide whether or not it's worthwhile to use it and then translate it when you decide that no, it's not usable, it'll take far longer than just translating it from scratch. My clients tend to want prose that's hard-hitting, with original turns of phrase, text that incites their clients to click on "buy now" rather than some tired old réchauffé.
If there happens to be a list of countries in a press release, yes I translate them manually. It takes five seconds. I'm not sure how long it would take to have them translated by MT, but I'm pretty sure I'm not wasting time needlessly.
I see that most people voted for 2,000 words a day, I voted 3,000. I remember working out a while back that, discounting downtime, I translated an average of 3,800 words a day while my colleague earning the same salary averaged half that. In all honesty I don't think I do as much nowadays, but my hourly rate as a freelancer is much more than when I was working in-house, so it's all good.
Justin if you need to translate 8,000 words a day to pay your rent, you must either be working at an abysmal rate or living in a mansion...
| | | | Sadek_A
Local time: 19:54
English to Arabic
+ ...
| Exaggerations aren't helpful to anyone! | Apr 27, 2022 |
Let's say in a 24hr day, one gets only 6 hrs of sleep, and another 2 hrs for everything else non-work (meals (buying, ordering, preparing, cooking, and cleaning, removing trash and dish-washing afterwards), bathroom activities (assuming they're normal, no constipation, no diarrhea, no frequent urination, nothing), showering (not taking a bath), taking important calls, replying to important messages, necessary speaking to important people in one's life, handling any surprise matter or emergency, ... See more Let's say in a 24hr day, one gets only 6 hrs of sleep, and another 2 hrs for everything else non-work (meals (buying, ordering, preparing, cooking, and cleaning, removing trash and dish-washing afterwards), bathroom activities (assuming they're normal, no constipation, no diarrhea, no frequent urination, nothing), showering (not taking a bath), taking important calls, replying to important messages, necessary speaking to important people in one's life, handling any surprise matter or emergency, etc. (and there are a lot of etceteras here)).
That leaves one only 16hrs a day for work. That is: 16h X 60m X 60s = 57600s.
Let's just divide 57600s by 7000w (not meant to undermine anyone's statement whatsoever, just genuine brainstorming) = 8.29s.
What are those 8 and a third seconds a word are for exactly? Finding out the exact correlation between that very word and the rest of the sentence, paragraph and ultimately the whole document?; amending the translated word as per any new development in understanding its meaning forward in the text?; typing that word in the internet search box, reading through the general results page, carefully examining that targeted, specific result link on the topic at hand, coming up with the best equivalent term as per the understanding attained from that research?; handling any software crash, hardware malfunction, power outage, internet disconnection?; etc. (and there are a lot of etceteras here too).
MIND YOU, all of the above is nothing but a fairytale where everything is going according to one's plan and nothing deviates from that timetable (not even by very few minutes).
*** Exaggerations give clients the wrong ideas, make them think that translation is an easy task and that translators make millions of dollars every quarter.
#keepitrealTRANSLATORS ▲ Collapse
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Justin Peterson wrote:
6,000 - 8,000, depending on the difficulty of the texts, and how many hours I can work that day.
[Edited at 2022-04-27 09:04 GMT]
I wonder what's your rent like... How many words do you need to translate to pay the rent? How many days does it take?
[Edited at 2022-04-27 14:12 GMT]
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