Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Productivity


Corinne McKay

Webinar question: how many words per day?

This is post #4 in my ongoing series of questions from the webinar on “Getting Started as a Freelance Translator” that I presented for the American Translators Association in December.

A participant asks: For a translator who doesn’t use CAT tools, what is the average turnaround/output in words per day?
Short answer: If you want to work for agencies, you probably need to translate 2,000-3,000 words per day in order to meet their deadlines. If you work for direct clients, you can work more at your own pace. I know translators who average anywhere between 200 and 1,000 finished words per hour, so obviously your mileage will vary!

Longer answer: First, I’m not completely convinced that CAT tools save translators a lot of time unless the project is extremely repetitive (i.e. updating a previously translated document). When I use WordFast or OmegaT, I find that my translation speed increases by about 10% because I’m not constantly finding my place in the source document and glancing back and forth between screens, but I also find that my editing time increases because my writing is more “chunked” and does not flow as well. I avoid using CAT tools on anything that is for publication, but that’s another post!

If I had to put a number on it, I would say that the average translator produces between 400 and 600 finished words per hour. However, most people can’t translate for 8 hours without stopping, and most of the time you’ll encounter a section in the document that you have to research or read about, so you’ll slow down. In addition, most translators’ work speed varies enormously depending on the subject matter and format of the document. Years ago I used to translate market research surveys that were so repetitive I could listen to audio books while I worked and still produce about 800 finished words per hour. However, this also meant that the work was not very stimulating/fulfilling/intellectually demanding and therefore not very satisfying. I’ve worked on really complex legal documents that involved multiple cross-references and layers of meaning, and I’ve dipped as low as 250 words per hour.

As I mentioned in the short answer to this question, I think that agencies expect that translators will produce 2,000 to 3,000 finished words per day, and in general you have to be able to translate that fast in order to make a healthy income on agency rates (of course there are exceptions!). I’m not in the “faster is better” camp, but if you want to translate faster, you could:

  • Work on your typing. It sounds simplistic, but a lot of translators could translate faster if they typed faster. Recently, someone doing a research project on translators’ typing speeds asked me to take this typing speed test. I scored 83 words a minute (eternal thanks to my 10th grade keyboarding teacher!); according to the typing website, this means that I save 5.5 hours per 10 hours of typing as compared with “the average typist” who does 36 words per minute. Moral: typing speed matters!
  • Use speech recognition software or hire a transcriptionist. Most speech recognition software and most transcriptionists should be able to handle 80-120 words per minute. If you’re at that 36 word per minute average, this could really increase your productivity. I haven’t tried speech recognition software because I just don’t think that fast! And I don’t mind typing. But most of the ultra-productive translators I know (800-1,000 words per hour) do use speech recognition software.
  • Concentrate on your specializations. I think that the best way to increase your translation speed is to become really knowledgeable about your areas of specialization and stick to them. Once you start to know the terminology, sentence structure, typical phrasing, and even your regular clients’ writing styles, you’ll really speed up.

Any other thoughts on translation speed?


Corinne McKay

Happy 2011: Are bad habits a form of self-protection?

Happy 2011 to everyone out there in the translation blogosphere!

To start the year off, here’s a very interesting interview I came across: sports writer Bill Simmons interviewing New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell. Both Simmons and Gladwell draw some interesting parallels between sports and the rest of life, but my favorite is Gladwell’s take on why certain people (in this case athletes, but it could be translators) “don’t work hard when it’s in their best interest to do so.” Gladwell posits, and I’d agree, that failure caused by poor preparation is a way to insulate oneself from a more awful possibility: failure caused by a lack of ability. Gladwell applies this theory to golfers Tiger Woods (an obsessive preparer on the golf course, whatever his vices off the course!) and Phil MIckelson (who states that he didn’t pick up a golf club for 5 weeks before a major tournament), saying “…it’s really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn’t work hard. It’s a form of self-protection. I swear that’s why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I’ll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating…”

Let’s apply this to the business of freelance translation. Hopefully you achieved some or even most of your goals for 2010. But as for the goals you didn’t achieve, did you fail because you didn’t follow through or did you fail because you followed through and still fell short of the target? I’m with Gladwell on this one; it’s a lot easier to tell yourself that you didn’t meet your income goal because you didn’t have time to do your marketing than it is to accept that you marketed and marketed and things didn’t pan out. Therefore, it’s a lot safer not to do the marketing so that you have that excuse in your back pocket.

So here’s a resolution for 2011: whatever your business-related goals are, give yourself permission to really, really try to meet them. Rather than protecting yourself with the usual “not enough time,” “too much else going on” types of excuses (I’m as guilty of these as the next translator!), give those goals your best, most honest and most thorough effort. Accept that you might not reach them, but try to drop the self-protecting excuses!


Corinne McKay

Thoughts on 2011

If you’re a freelancer, it’s time to start thinking about your business-related tasks for wrapping up 2010 and starting 2011 on a positive note. A few thoughts:

  • Are you going to raise your rates? If so, think about how to raise them effectively. Are you going to raise your rates for new clients and keep existing clients at the same rate, or raise them across the board? Are you going to approach your regular clients in advance of the rate raise and see if they’re amenable, or inform them of the rate raise and see what happens? Keep in mind: it’s easier to raise your rates a little bit each year rather than trying to impose a drastic increase every few years; some agency clients may have a rate ceiling and it’s up to you if you want to work for that rate or not; in my opinion, the more objective you are about rates (by using a rate sheet or similar tool), the better.
  • What are your tax prep plans? Are you going to prepare your taxes yourself, stick with your current accountant or use a new accountant? Whichever option you choose, start early. My accountant has gotten me in the habit of closing out my books as soon as the year ends and preparing my taxes as soon as possible after that. This saves a lot of sleepless nights and hand-wringing in April!
  • How about year-end retirement (or other) contributions? Depending on the financial instrument, you may have until April 15 to make these contributions; but plan them now! Making a year-end contribution to your 401K or similar account can be a great way to save on taxes (make sure to check with a tax professional to make sure you’re doing this legally!), but make sure you budget accordingly.
  • And as for your goals? Force yourself to cast an objective eye on 2010. Be honest with yourself. What goals did you meet, exceed or fall short of? Most importantly, how can you make a step-by-step plan for reaching your goals in 2011?


Corinne McKay

Why netbooks are better than smartphones

Back in the summer of 2009, I wrote about my decision to purchase a netbook. Over a year later, my Asus Eee is still going strong and I still love it. I paid around $300 via Newegg and I haven’t had any software or hardware problems with my netbook despite some heavy use. And it’s really, really small and light:

I have pretty big hands but you get the picture: it’s small.

At the time I wrote my 2009 post, I was hemming and hawing between a netbook and a smartphone. I understand many of the reasons that people use and love smartphones, but I’ve since come to believe that at least for my purposes, a netbook is a much better option. Because:

  • It forces you to decide when you really need to work on the go. I’m firmly against being always on duty; I work hard while I’m working, and then I shut the computer off and go play. In fact, I think that there’s growing evidence to suggest that people who work in the low 30 hours per week are the most productive. If I owned a smartphone, I know that I would take it with me most of the time: why not use those few minutes while I’m waiting for my daughter at school or standing in line at the supermarket? But, at the risk of sounding like a Luddite, where do those “few minutes” end, and why not engage with the offline world for a few minutes? With a netbook, I only take it with me when I really need it, but because it’s so small, I do take it sometimes. My family recently went on a multi-day bike trip while I was working on a book translation. I was faced with the option to work three or four 12-hour days before we left, or to take the netbook with me and work at night on the trip. I chose the latter, stuck the Eee in my bike bag (no kidding, it fits in a bike pannier!) and felt much less stressed. My Eee also fits in the messenger bag that I use as a purse, so I take it when I get my car’s oil changed or when I know I’ll be stuck waiting somewhere for a long period of time.
  • You can do real work on it. My typing accuracy on my Eee is only marginally lower than on my desktop’s keyboard. By contrast, I think that a lot of e-mails that people write from smartphones have a smartphone quality to them; that’s OK if it’s a quick note to a colleague, but I wouldn’t want to respond to a client that way. And if I’m just reading the e-mails for the sake of reading them, why not just wait until I’m in my office? In addition, I think it can be really hard if not impossible to look at attached documents on a smartphone. My netbook has a 10 inch screen which is too small for some tasks (i.e. having multiple documents on the screen at once) but works well for word processing, reading PDFs and browsing the web.
  • A netbook can do most of what a laptop can do. Full-size laptops certainly aren’t obsolete; if you need a big screen or a really big hard drive or a lot of processor power, a full-size laptop is probably still your best choice. Netbooks are pretty amazing for their size, but I don’t think that running your speech recognition software on top of your translation memory program on top of your office suite would work very well on one. However, my netbook has completely replaced my full-size laptop for traveling (it has a standard VGA port so can be hooked up to a projector) and I wrote most of the second edition of my book on it using LyX.

Obviously the title of this article is an overstatement; if you work on projects for which you just need to monitor e-mails, I think that a smartphone can be a great choice. And I think that the urge to work too much pulls at all of us freelancers regardless of whether we have a smartphone or not. But I do think that netbooks are worth a look if you’re in needs analysis mode!


Corinne McKay

Projects large and small

At the moment I’m working on one of the larger projects I’ve ever taken on; a bit over 40,000 words. This has gotten me thinking about the pros and cons of large projects versus small projects, as well as which type of projects I prefer working on. I’m interested to hear what other translators think about this as well.

I think that there are a few issues associated with project length: income potential, job satisfaction and quality control (and probably others that I’ll depend on you to point out!). In terms of income potential, I don’t give volume discounts because I am usually as busy as I want to be. However, I do like that a large project gives me the opportunity to earn a guaranteed large chunk of money at once rather than a few hundred dollars at a time. Large projects have some economies of scale: one invoice, one client, one glossary for 40,000 words as opposed to multiplying all of that by 10 for a slew of 4,000 word jobs. However, I find that the higher the word count, the higher the chance of client sticker shock regardless of the per-word rate. I charge $50 per page to translate official documents, which often comes out to $1 a word or more. Still, very few potential clients ever object to that rate. But when you’re talking about 30,000 or 50,000 or 75,000 words, even a very reasonable per-word rate just comes out to a pretty huge number (and numbers tend to sound bigger when you have to say them out loud!). So, in some ways I find that it’s easier to charge high rates for short documents than it is for long ones.

Job satisfaction. I think this can cut both ways. When you land a huge project that you really love working on, it’s a treat. Life is predictable because you know what the day’s agenda is and you can really enjoy the work. But when you commit to a big project and things go wrong, it’s really excruciating. Rather than telling yourself “one more day and I never have to look at this document again,” you might be facing a month or more of slogging through a book or manual that you wish you’d never come eye to eye with.

Quality control
 on very large projects is hard. I seem to forget this every time I take on a huge project. I use CAT tools and I have a pretty good memory for terms, but when you’re getting that “haven’t I read this somewhere before?” feeling on a project that you’ve been working on for 3 weeks, it’s not always easy to pull up the section of text you’re thinking about. And when you were mulling over “CEO” versus “Chief Executive Officer,” which one did you choose? Did you change your original term or just think about it?

In general, I think that my ideal project length is about 5,000 to 8,000 words: long enough to really get into, long enough to generate a decent invoice but not long enough to start getting bored. A project of that length represents about 3-5 days of work for me, and I find that to be an appealing amount of time to work on a project. Thoughts?