File under: food for thought. A colleague and former student e-mailed me this morning and asked how many words a year I translate, and whether I track it. I haven’t tracked it–until now–and I guessed 300,000 words. My reasoning was: conventional wisdom holds that “the average” (whatever that means) full-time translator produces about 500,000 words a year. I translate about 60% of the time and work on my books and classes about 40% of the time, but I also focus on higher-paying translation work that allows me to work at a non-breakneck pace.
Then, as I was translating away this morning…I had to know. I figured we’re only a quarter and a little through the year, so it wouldn’t take that long to add it all up. True: after about half an hour of fiddling with a spreadsheet, I came up with the following stats. Because I do a lot of official document work where word count is kind of irrelevant, I broke those out into their own category. The Q1 (ish) totals:
- 80,621 words of projects billed by the word or by the project
- 61 pages of official documents billed by the page. I originally had 53, but then I immediately delivered 8 more today.
Is this a little? A lot? Who knows, but there you go. If you keep stats, what are yours?
For me, it’s hard to come up with a solid figure since translation software makes it not so easy to arrive at – i’ts easier to back into it from my receipts. I get a figure somewhere in the realm of 550,000 words per year, after deducting out for editing jobs.
Interesting, thanks!
For some time, I tracked the number of words translated by month and by year. When I was translating full-time, I translated somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000 words per year, give or take. That figure does not include the number of words reviewed or the time expended on other projects and down time during the less busy cycles.
I no longer track any of those numbers, because I no longer translate full-time. I must admit, though: ignorance is bliss. I don’t miss the “pea counting,” as they say in German.
Very interesting, thanks!
I’ve been using a spreadsheet to tally pretty consistently since 2010, but I do multiple pairs and directions so have been lazy about the breakdowns. It’s fluctuated between 100-150,000 per year.
Interesting, thanks Nadine!
I started tracking my translation (time taken, rates, target-source langues [I translate Russian-English, but sometimes I undertake English-Russian projects], proofreading times, word count etc). I have an entire excel book with like 10 sheets of statistics. I noticed I do about 250-350 thousand words a year, since I only translate about 50% of the time. I was so proud to hit 1,000,000 words in mid-2018 🙂
Thanks, Marina! Very interesting statistics and I’m glad you enjoyed the post.
Since I started working in the translation business in 2016, I am tracking all my projects (word count, type of project, etc.) because one of the agencies I am working with asked me every 2 years a very detailed resume (they have specific categories and they want to know estimate volume of word translated in each category).
Reading your post and the comments, I am quite glad of my stats 🙂 I did around 300-350 000 words the last 2 years. I reduced it this year because I went back to university. I hope to be able to reach back my average by the end of the year.
Really interesting, thanks Marie!