Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Technology


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

Why you need good web hosting: a cautionary tale

This post could also be titled “Making web hosting easy versus making web hosting cheap” (to follow up on a previous post) and it’s mainly intended to express my undying gratitude to the people at Front Range Internet (FRII).

Ever since I launched my new professional website about a month ago, I’ve been meaning to remove my old website from my hosting account (can you tell where this is headed?). On Monday morning I had a bit of unscheduled time so I decided to take care of this. I’m fairly compulsive about doing technical tasks the right way, so I logged in to my web hosting account via FTP, then called my sysadmin husband to verify that I was doing the right thing, then called FRII tech support to verify that I was doing the right thing. Here’s where the problem started: I explained my plan to the tech support rep as “I just navigate into the correct folder and then delete all of the files for the old site, right?” To which he correctly responded “Yes!” and offered to walk me through the deletion process. I declined (bad idea 1.0) because I was sure I knew what I was doing and didn’t want to waste his time.

After I got off the phone, I thought I had an even better plan: instead of deleting my old site page by page, I would just delete the whole folder that it was in (bad idea 2.0). So I highlighted the “WWW” folder in my account, clicked delete, clicked the “are you really sure” box and happily watched as the file names for all the deleted pages in my old site scrolled by; fantastic! A moment later, my delight turned to abject horror as file names for my new site popped up in the “deleted files” box. It took me a minute to realize what was happening, and then another minute to find the “stop” button on the FTP tool, but in that amount of time I had blown away enough pages that my new site was gone from the web. Worse, I had just sent out a bunch of links to a new article I’d written for translation clients. And I hadn’t backed up the new site since it went live. And my web designer’s programmer was on vacation and unreachable. I’m a pretty low-key person, but I literally screamed alone in my office when I realized what I’d done.

Here’s where things started to get better: in ten years of being married to my tech support, I’ve learned something. When you really mess up a tech task, your first priority is to not make it worse. So instead of following my panic-driven impulse to just click stuff and try to fix what I’d done, I went out to the kitchen and drank a glass of passionfruit juice. This calmed me down enough that I decided to call my web hosting provider (FRII) and just admit what I’d done. Hi, it’s me, the one who didn’t need you to walk me through the process of deleting the old site…well, guess what I managed to do?

And here’s why it’s worth paying $20 a month for web hosting from a really high-quality ISP. The first thing FRII tech support told me was “No problem, we’ll just restore your site from last night’s backup.” This took, no kidding, about 3 minutes. Then, they looked in their FTP log to figure out what I did to blow away the new site (hint: NEVER delete entire folders from your web hosting account unless you really know what you’re doing. Just delete the individual files in the folders). Better still, the people at FRII were totally pleasant, didn’t make me feel like an idiot (which they would have been completely justified in doing) and made the whole thing seem like no big deal. Morals of this story:

  • If you have a website for your freelance business, back it up right this second.
  • Then, call your web hosting provider and ask how often they run backups and how long it would take to restore your site if you did something terrible to it.
  • If the answer to that question isn’t satisfactory (i.e. your hosting provider doesn’t back your site up), switch hosting providers ASAP.

Thanks, FRII!


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

The drawbacks of translation memory tools

This summer, I’ve had a number of conversations with fellow freelance translators about some of the negative aspects of translation memory tools (CAT tools, TenTs, you know what I mean!). While I use and enjoy OmegaT and Wordfast, I agree that TM tools are not right for every translator or for every translation.

TM tools have some obvious selling points, primarily that they allow us to work faster and more consistently. I’ll never forget the first job on which I used Wordfast: it was a computer skills manual, and the final chapter consisted of fill-in-the-blank questions that were drawn word for word from the previous chapters. Using Wordfast, I think it took me an hour to translate that last chapter, which was about 3,000 words long. Without a TM tool, that task would have required an excruciating amount of copying and pasting from the material I had already translated. Right there, I felt that Wordfast was worth every cent I had paid for it.

I also think that TM tools have some ergonomic advantages. If you’re working between two documents, it’s very tiring on your eyes to be constantly glancing back and forth between them as you lose and find your place over and over again. Less typing is obviously better for your hands, and the colored text fields that many TM tools use are much easier on your eyes than a glaring white screen with black type. I have a tendency to read too fast, and I like the fact that the TM segments force me to look at only one sentence at a time; I find that when using OmegaT or Wordfast, I can also work about 10% faster even if the document does not have many repetitions.

Some of the disadvantages of TM tools are obvious, and some are more subtle. It’s easy to see that match propagation (automatically applying a given translation throughout your document or project) also means error propagation. It’s horrifying enough to receive a reference document from a client that includes a serious translation error, but it’s far worse to think that that error has been enshrined in the client’s TM database and provided to every translator that the client works with.

Over time, and after attending Translate in the Catskills and other writing-focused workshops for translators, I’ve also come to believe that TM tools often impede good writing. The segment-by-segment approach has its advantages, but it definitely does not encourage smooth writing that flows throughout the document since you’re working on only one segment at a time. In some TM tools I’ve demo’d (not OmegaT or Wordfast), your translated segments  even disappear from the screen once you approve them, which makes it almost impossible to create a text that has a cohesive tone. TM tools also make it difficult to reverse the order of words or sentences, since you then end up with matches that don’t match up. The TM tool has no way of knowing that you decided to restructure a paragraph for stylistic reasons, it simply matches your source and target sentences and assumes that they mean the same thing.

Since I’ve spent this year focusing on the quality of my writing, I’ve changed my workflow for jobs on which I use a TM tool. Instead of proofreading directly in the tool’s interface, I clean up/compile the translation, then proofread from that target-only document, then input my changes into the TM tool interface. This takes longer than proofing directly in the tool, but I’ve found that when I’m proofing mostly for style, tone and flow, it’s nearly impossible to work in one segment at a time.

Any other TM pros/cons/best practices out there?


Corinne McKay

Tech tip: wrapping text around a table in OpenOffice

This is a small tip but it really helped me on a recent project. Normally, OpenOffice Writer doesn’t allow you to wrap text around a table. So if you have a table on the left side of the page and text on the right side, it ends up looking like this:

This can be a problem when you’re translating something like an official document, and you need to reproduce the source formatting exactly.You can work around the problem by inserting your table into a frame (Insert>Frame) and making the frame’s border invisible (in the Frame dialog box, click the Borders tab and then set the border to None). Then, you get this:

It would be great if OpenOffice would just enable text flow around tables, but this seems like a fairly painless solution in the meantime!