Ryan Ginstrom wrote a great comment on my last post about high-earning translators (among other things, informing us that among Japanese translators, the gold standard is now US $200,000!). In his comment, Ryan also observed that “Working long hours only pays off for so long — study after study has shown that when knowledge workers (that’s us!) work long hours (more than 40/week), productivity rapidly drops off, and total output is often lower than those working 40 hours.”
And…he’s right! If you’d like to spend some time learning about the history of the eight-hour work day, take a look at the International Game Developers Association’s fascinating article “Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work,” written by Evan Robinson. The article starts out by informing us, the knowledge workers, that when we work more than 40 hours a week, productivity starts to drop; not just a little, but to the extent that if we work eight 60-hour weeks in a row, we produce about as much as we would have in eight 40-hour weeks. Over the short term, (i.e. a few days), crunch mode can be effective, allowing us to churn out a big job by the deadline. But for those of us who consistently work overtime because we’re convinced that we get more done, crunch mode starts to backfire.
The story is the same for people who are convinced that they function just fine on a small amount of sleep. Robinson’s article cites a military study that showed that after two weeks, someone sleeping four hours a night is functioning at a cognitive deficit of nearly 60% as compared with someone sleeping seven hours a night.
If you have time to read the article, scroll down to the “What’s It All Mean?” section at the end, in which Robinson makes a strong argument that not only does knowledge worker overtime not produce results, it increases the odds of a massive human error that puts the entire project in jeopardy. So, while a marathon effort once in a while may be inevitable, don’t kid yourself about your stamina… work a maximum of eight hours, five days a week, and then shut that computer off!
So true about productivity. This is why I observe the industry standard of translating no more than 2,000 words a day. Period. You need to pace yourself, or you’ll find yourself making mistakes that you would not normally make.
Werner, thanks for your comment! It’s great to hear from translators who hold themselves to the 2,000 word limit; clients may push for more, but in the end I think everyone benefits. Thanks for reading!
I think it’s a good idea to pace yourself, but the problem with holding a 2,000-word limit is that not all 2,000 words are created alike. With some documents, 2,000 words would leave me exhausted at the end of the day, while with others, I’d get them done and be feeling great at about the time I started thinking about lunch.
Ryan, you are absolutely correct. But this is why we have this standard of 2,000 words. Even in cases where you’re exhausted at the end of the day, the thing to remember is that you will be able to complete this volume within a normal working day (with varying degrees of exhaustion).
In some cases, the 2,000 words may take you no more than two hours, while in others, you’ll be at it for the full eight-hour day from nine to five.
But the main thing is that it’s a volume that can be managed and completed in a day. Three thousand or even five thousand words (as one international agency with that “perfect” name invariably expects of its translators, and overnight, too), however, cannot be managed in a day.
It is about quality assurance, after all. To ensure the most flawless product at the end of the day, we must adhere to no more than 2,000 words as the absolute maximum.
There are also agencies, for example, that use 1,000 words as the daily cutoff, which is even better, of course.
@Werner Patels
As a personal preference, I’d avoid the 2,000-word job that takes all day, take another job that lets me do 5,000 words a day, and take more days off. 🙂
My quality on the 5,000-word/day job will most likely be better than my quality on the 2,000-word/day job, because when I can work faster it’s because I have expertise in the subject area and don’t have to waste time on research/dictionary work.
That’s for my own situation and type of work, of course. For you it’s probably different. But that’s why an “absolute maximum” doesn’t work as a blanket statement. Everyone’s skills, expertise, temperament, and clients differ.
If a client wants me to do more than I’m prepared to handle, I just say “no.” I’m an independent professional, not the client’s employee, and I don’t have to take a job if I can’t or don’t want to handle it.
I, too, follow the 2000 word/day “rule” in my time planning. Of course one’s daily output varies – I’ve had Texts from Hell where the formatting was so troublesome that I was lucky to accomplish 1000 words/day in my best subjects (I refer to these as “tag salad” because of the way the segments look in TagEditor or DVX, my usual working environments); at other times I can pull off nearly 9000 words in a day (with almost no repetition) and still get a good night’s sleep. But planning 2000 per day usually allows extra time for the many unplanned incidents in the daily routine, including short “emergency” texts for which one can charge a healthy premium or build good will. By booking out my calendar with that limiting assumption, I can always take any “extra” capacity I have when the “daily limit” is met early and finish projects sooner, which usually has positive benefits.
One thing I have noticed which has a significant impact on productivity is how those words are distributed. If the 2000 words are constituted by a number of smaller projects, the administration and setup time for the individual projects may cause things to go much slower overall. As I have seen the “damage” done to productivity by numerous daily requests for “just a few sentences” or “only 50 words”, I have become increasingly rigorous in imposing minimum charges to turn these time-wasters into profit.
I thing it is not just a question of how much words do you translate a day, but how much you are paid and where do you translate. Don’t know how much you people pay in the US in taxes. Here in Spain freelancers pay around 25 to 30%. So, with an average of 3000 € a month (around 2.300 $), it is just imposible to make 100.000 a year unless you work on a very specific field.
Thanks to everyone for your comments. I think you’re right that a) the 2,000 words per day guideline is a good one and b) sometimes 2,000 words takes 3 hours and sometimes it takes 10 hours. I guess we could also go around and around about whether it’s better to charge by the word or by the hour, but that’s another post! Kevin, I agree with you about the many small projects versus one big one; I also find that as I “ramp up” on a project, I can usually translate faster, versus familiarizing myself with the terms and writing style in a bunch of small documents.
@Olli, the average ATA member (most but not all of whom live in the US) earns about US $60,000 per year from full-time freelancing, so that’s US $5,000 per month. If freelancers in Spain are averaging US $ 2,300, it seems that rates there are substantially lower or people tend to work less. You might want to talk to some US-based English to Spanish translators for more details.