| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5] > | How many words can you translate a day Thread poster: dmoamin
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Mari Noller
United Kingdom
Local time: 08:45
English to Norwegian
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| Interesting topic | Aug 29, 2008 |
A few days since someone posted in this topic, but never mind...
I've recently had an interesting discussion with an agency about this matter. They assumed I could only take on around 2500 words per day and therefore didn't send me anymore. I only discovered this by accident and found it a little odd because I normally get through around 4500 - 5000 words a day. On a few occasions I have somehow managed to get through 13 000 words in 24 hours, but that is not advisable...
... See more A few days since someone posted in this topic, but never mind...
I've recently had an interesting discussion with an agency about this matter. They assumed I could only take on around 2500 words per day and therefore didn't send me anymore. I only discovered this by accident and found it a little odd because I normally get through around 4500 - 5000 words a day. On a few occasions I have somehow managed to get through 13 000 words in 24 hours, but that is not advisable...
That is working 10-14 hours with my normal subject of course, but I still find 2500 words to be quite low.
What takes up the most time in my day is probably the small -100 word projects. Simply downloading the files, extracting, opening, translating, checking glossaries, proofing, compressing and uploading again.. Before you know it half an hour has gone by. ▲ Collapse
| | | | dmoamin 
United States
Local time: 00:45
Arabic to English
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TOPIC STARTER
Thanks again to everyone I really appreciate all the nice comments and supportive advices I received on this topic.
I know I can do a lot more than 700-1000. I simply never thought of actually doing the math to calculate the actual number of words i do per day. But I know that I do a lot. One time I completed a “Health Quid" for new immigrants in less than 2 days and reviewed in one day. It is a booklet of 45 pages and it includes a lot of tables with a lot and a lot of medical te... See more Thanks again to everyone I really appreciate all the nice comments and supportive advices I received on this topic.
I know I can do a lot more than 700-1000. I simply never thought of actually doing the math to calculate the actual number of words i do per day. But I know that I do a lot. One time I completed a “Health Quid" for new immigrants in less than 2 days and reviewed in one day. It is a booklet of 45 pages and it includes a lot of tables with a lot and a lot of medical terms and complicated expressions and paragraphs. I don’t know how did I finish it but I know I did it.
I also completed about 4 more similar projects in other fields to include law, government, firefighting, and a documentary book.
So I know that I can do more, but, at the same time, I never thought of actually counting the number of words. In addition to that, when a company or a client provide me with a deadline to a certain project, I finish it right on time and I make sure to give myself some time to review and edit and make sure it is accurate. So I am on time all the time I was never late and I will never bee late. But it is hard when you have to deal with math. and I don’t consider it a measure to anything when words are measure, I think it should be may be pages? it makes more sense but, I guess page wise it might be deceiving since you don’t know how many words in your page, there might be something like a 100-200 words per page ..
Thanks to all of you this was really helpful ▲ Collapse
| | | | | You've got to be kidding | Aug 29, 2008 |
dmoamin wrote:
But it is hard when you have to deal with math. and I don’t consider it a measure to anything when words are measure, I think it should be may be pages? it makes more sense but, I guess page wise it might be deceiving since you don’t know how many words in your page, there might be something like a 100-200 words per page ..
You can't be serious. The "math" involved is of the most elementary sort. If you can't handle this, I suppose you can't handle the household budget either or keep track of whether you have enough money to pay for a shopping basket full of food.
Think logically for a minute. What actually takes up your time in translation? Is it the pages on which the words are printed, or is it the words themselves, the quantity of text? (I'll ignore formatting issues for now.)
What is so hard about working for a few hours or a day and then at the end of that time counting how much text you have translated (there are usually functions in the word processor or translation environment to do this for you), then dividing the total words, characters or whatever by the number of hours worked to get your output per hour? If you think your time is worth USD 10 per hour (I wouldn't pay much more to someone who can't handle basic math , then divide that hourly rate by the number of words and you've got your word price.
As several people have pointed out, your throughput will depend on the level of the text or subject matter, but you can still calculate averages or, if you like, set different rates for different types of text. Each of us approach this problem a bit differently, and the important thing is to find a system that works for you.
I wouldn't worry too much about what other people can handle in a day for your language pair. Certainly it's useful to know where the rate averages fall, but in the end you've got to make a living, and you only have so many hours in a day to do it in. I sneer at ten cents a word in my language pair because it puts me below what I want to earn for an hour's work, but a colleague who translates at 8 cents a word but twice as fast will have a healthier bank account for the same day's work. Why anyone good would want to sell themselves so cheaply is another matter, but the fact is that that person is still the hands-down winner due to greater efficiency.
Once you have a good, quantitative understanding of how efficiently you work you can combine it with what you NEED TO EARN or want to earn and convert that data into whatever silly units the customer wants: words in source text, words in target text, standard lines, standard pages or any other gobbledegook. I roll my eyes every time I see the stupid discussion in the German translator's association forums about "how to deal with word pricing" or get a call from a nice but clueless foreign agency client who wants help to figure out line prices for a new German customer. This is not rocket science. This is the level of math we expect children to handle by the time they finish elementary school. Anyone who wants to stay in business and simplify business dealings will learn to figure at a fifth grade level at least (I hope).
[Edited at 2008-08-29 23:02]
| | | | dmoamin
United States
Local time: 00:45
Arabic to English
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TOPIC STARTER
Thank you for the long lecture about 5th grader and math and also thank you for making it sound that horrible.
First , If you noticed, I had dismissed the page idea. And of course it is the words on the pages that take the time to translate, but that was not what I meant by my comment. I was trying to say in addition to the text type, topic, workload and all the other issues that determine the price of a translation, we can also include the number of pages included instead of the number o... See more Thank you for the long lecture about 5th grader and math and also thank you for making it sound that horrible.
First , If you noticed, I had dismissed the page idea. And of course it is the words on the pages that take the time to translate, but that was not what I meant by my comment. I was trying to say in addition to the text type, topic, workload and all the other issues that determine the price of a translation, we can also include the number of pages included instead of the number of words ( which might be legitimate choice in some cases specially when you have very small number of words per page, and a lot of pages to translate) There are some translators who charge per page instead of per word , and I think it is ok to do so and it all comes down to the type of translation required and many other issues.
I am also not talking about math as in school math. I am talking about counting words in translation business and that is not the same as 5th grade math, as a matter of fact there is no connection at all between the two. I was trying to see how do other professional translators & colleagues decide their word count and the simple equation provided helped a lot in addition to all the other advices mentioned. I was simply trying to find out, is it simply pure words count , is words and workload, is it words and deadline? Is it a combination of all, if so what is the math behind it, that is the math I was referring to.
I liked a lot what other colleagues wrote, their advices, and thoughts. I learned a lot from it and I am very grateful to that. I agree and practice almost all of it when I do my translations. It is usually what I do when I want to decide on the price for the project so I take into consideration ( the type of text, the difficulty, time, deadline, topic, workload, etc) . I have been in business for a while but I have not been asked to count the words I can translate per day until recently (mainly because I deal directly with the clients and not with companies). So I thought of asking experts and I don’t think that I deserve to be shot dead because I asked a question that might sound a 5th grade math question to you. Even though I don’t see any connection between the two at all and I don’t see the reason or benefit that this comparison brings in answering my question.
And I don’t think that any questions asked anywhere in any other forum, are bad or deserve that harsh/sarcastic answer for any reason, all questions are legitimate, ( I don’t believe in the dumb question theories) what sounds very familiar to you may not to others and there is nothing wrong with that. This is another reason why there are good places like Proz.com to ask question and communicate over things that you didn’t know about before in this profession. I don’t think we need to put each other down because we asked a question that might seem simple in nature.
As to what other translators and colleagues charge such as .10, or .9 or whatever the price is, I am sure they have their own reason for it and I don’t think that ( selling themselves cheap) has anything to do with it, this is business like any other business, people might start small and then grow and those are decisions made individually and for different reasons and I don’t think we need to be judgmental about that part.
So I am sorry if the question about counting the number of words counted per day offended you in any way or made you feel that you are answering a 5th grade question, but, I didn’t know how to count my daily translated words because I simply never needed it.
In all cases, I appreciate your answer. ▲ Collapse
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| Let me put it this way.... | Aug 30, 2008 |
dmoamin wrote:
So I am sorry if the question about counting the number of words counted per day offended you in any way or made you feel that you are answering a 5th grade question, but, I didn’t know how to count my daily translated words because I simply never needed it.
If I ask you how many roses I have in my garden, what sort of an answer can I expect from you? Maybe a less sarcastic one than what I gave, but in other respects not much different. You would tell me to go count them - any other answer would be rather pointless. And if I tell you that there are three people in the household and want to know how many cut flowers from those roses each person could receive, the math - which is really more 3rd or 4th grade math, not 5th grade math, but many schools are a bit slow these days so I make allowances - will be essentially the same as the calculation that has been presented in this thread. Indeed, these days fifth graders are asked to solve tougher math problems in many cases. Those are the hated "story problems" as they used to be (and perhaps still are) called.
It is also worth noting that these discussions crop up at least several times a week. People who presumably have the research skills to investigate a topic adequately so that they can translate it well seem unable to do simple keyword searches in the forums to see whether the matter has been discussed before. It's not that I really object to the repetition - it doesn't eat space on my hard drive, so I don't care - but the quality of the answers and the way that the examples are presented vary widely. You might be utterly mystified by some of the explanations in this thread (or not), but an explanation on the same topic from Jack X two years ago, which is still accessible through the search function, might be far more enlightening for your situation. Some people might interpret a question like "how do I calculate a word rate?" in the light of such a wealth of past information as being indicative of great laziness or no research skills. That might not be the case, but it can certainly appear to be.
In any case, I apologize if I offended you with my remarks about fifth grade, and I apologize as well to any fifth graders and parents of fifth graders who may be reading this thread and seething because such a problem would not really meet the high standards of today's fifth grade education
| | | | | Rate calculations | Aug 30, 2008 |
This is a bit off-topic, but still relevant to the whole issue of figuring out what to charge for one's services and dealing with requests for quotes in forms with which one might not be familiar. Time and again I get calls from small agencies who are freaked out by a customer wanting a quote in units they don't usually use, or I see the same issues raised on ProZ, the BDÜ boards or elsewhere. In many of these discussions, links are provided to online "calculators" or ballpark numbers are tosse... See more This is a bit off-topic, but still relevant to the whole issue of figuring out what to charge for one's services and dealing with requests for quotes in forms with which one might not be familiar. Time and again I get calls from small agencies who are freaked out by a customer wanting a quote in units they don't usually use, or I see the same issues raised on ProZ, the BDÜ boards or elsewhere. In many of these discussions, links are provided to online "calculators" or ballpark numbers are tossed around, but there's really no good substitute for hard, empirical data based on one's own work.
I put together a quick example of a spreadsheet into which one can copy the source and target text statistics (words and total keystrokes in my example since this is easy to figure out with the text count function of MS Word or by dozens of other methods). One can enter a "standard" character count for lines and pages, and the total pages will be calculated automatically.
The ratios between source words and target words as well as source lines to target lines is calculated. This gives you an idea of how much your text may "grow" or "shrink" and what factor you may have to use so that charging a text by different methods leads to the same total cost (within a relatively small margin of error using averages).
The ratios between lines and words are also calculated automatically so that persons usually dealing with one method can quickly quote a rate which will, on the average, lead to the same economic result.
Off on the right (columns O through T) is a conditional calculator in which you can enter the hours worked and rate charged (source words, source lines, target words, target lines) and see how much you earned per hour.
The spreadsheet can be downloaded here or from the "How To" tab on my profile.
Take this tool, fill it with your own data from your own language pairs and stop worrying about getting "cheated" by calculating with an unfamiliar method. You can ALSO use the numbers in this spreadsheet to identify "outlier" jobs quickly, ones where it really is worth the trouble to argue for a different rate. In my source language (German), mile-long lists of huge compound words come to mind as a type of text which will stick out here like a sore thumb and require an especially high rate. You can use the ratios which are calculated automatically to figure out just how much higher!
[Edited at 2008-08-30 19:09] ▲ Collapse
| | | | | it all depends | Aug 30, 2008 |
I occasionally get asked about my average daily output (but more often get asked "how soon can you do this? or "can you do this by X date?" or "how many words could you handle by X?" if the project is being batched up among several translators). It didn't take long working as a translator to get a ballpark idea of this number, "all else being equal," which of course it never is. I've never actually done a formal calculation, but in my pairs payment is almost always by the word, so I've always go... See more I occasionally get asked about my average daily output (but more often get asked "how soon can you do this? or "can you do this by X date?" or "how many words could you handle by X?" if the project is being batched up among several translators). It didn't take long working as a translator to get a ballpark idea of this number, "all else being equal," which of course it never is. I've never actually done a formal calculation, but in my pairs payment is almost always by the word, so I've always got to calculate words for the invoice, and from there's it's pretty simple to think about how many hours or days the N-word project actually took to complete.
I think my average is on the high side (though I often wonder how comparable this 2,500-word "industry average" is across language pairs and suspect that the average for my pairs is somewhat higher). I tend to understate it somewhat to clients, however, so I don't come across as a complete blowhard, among other reasons. If they specifically ask what my average output is (and this happened on a project just this week), I'll also let them know if I've got commitments underway or on the horizon that would preclude me from devoting myself full-time to their project, if it's a biggish one.
As to what affects that output: obviously, a lot of things! I would say it depends less on the subject matter per se than the nature of the text within the subject matter. Some "technical texts" are, in fact, 95% standard narrative prose with 5% technical terms thrown in. This is a much different animal than a long listing of technical specifications that is only 50% filler words and 50% "terminology." On the third hand, a PDF scan of a school transcript may be completely straightforward, vocab-wise, but a total pain in the ... as far as formatting. ▲ Collapse
| | | | dmoamin
United States
Local time: 00:45
Arabic to English
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TOPIC STARTER
From 5th grader to flowers very interested and very strong relationship. Thank you for taking the time to answer sarcastically again. Very nice sense of humor I really appreciate the time you put into explaining 5th grader concept to me by explaining the flower count this time. Really helpful and very encouraging points specially coming from you. And sorry I bored you and had you write twice to explain a 5th grader question/answer to me, oh and with example this time, like real teacher. Now ... See more From 5th grader to flowers very interested and very strong relationship. Thank you for taking the time to answer sarcastically again. Very nice sense of humor I really appreciate the time you put into explaining 5th grader concept to me by explaining the flower count this time. Really helpful and very encouraging points specially coming from you. And sorry I bored you and had you write twice to explain a 5th grader question/answer to me, oh and with example this time, like real teacher. Now you have to write a third time to explain the flower concept.
I already explained what I wanted before and I don’t want to waste more time explaining again obviously other translators understand my point and what I am asking about..so
Moving on.. ▲ Collapse
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dmoamin
United States
Local time: 00:45
Arabic to English
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TOPIC STARTER
Kathryn Litherland thank you so much for your reply & for sharing your thoughts. I get that questions a lot too how soon can you finish 60 pages on so topic, or sometimes " I need this yesterday". Which I find interesting and funny.
| | | | Erzsébet Czopyk
Hungary
Local time: 09:45
Member (2006)
Russian to Hungarian
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SITE LOCALIZER | as more you invest ... | Aug 31, 2008 |
Astrid Elke Johnson wrote:
... and, I expect, to get your "official" daily rate, you multiply that by six, seven or eight (it may be as little as six, if you also wish to include other essential tasks related to the job in a daily hour count of eight hours).
However, I do not like it when agencies ask how many words I can translate per day. For them, at any time, it would not be more than half of the total words that I can translate in a day, since I have to reserve the other half of the day for other customers. I feel that the question suggests that they may wish, from time to time, to monopolise my time for an entire day, or even several days, and that is not acceptable to me from a business perspective.
Astrid
Dear astrid, as an agency owner, I completely agree with you...except one thing.
"I feel that the question suggests that they may wish, from time to time, to monopolise my time for an entire day" my answer is definitely not. But from the PM's point of view if can be a very important information in case of urgent project. Try to imagine if we have no information at all, and in case of urgency we have to call/e-mail all of the translators and begin ask them! As my office specialized for urgent translations, I have a small groups of EN-HU translators for extra urgent projects - each of the members of this group can blind typewrite and my PM's biggest output was 13,000 (!!!) words in a day (!!!) If I personally would not see what he is doing, I would tell this is not true.
To dmoamin: "But it is hard when you have to deal with math. " No, this should not be hard if you going to make a business! I hated it before, but if you want to make money in this industry, there are few things what you should learn and force yourself to know. You cannot tell to the tax and finance inspector: "sorry, I did not read the related law", because you might be not read it, anyway, you have acting according it! As more you know and as more you invest to learn more about (I mean invest your time, money, etc.), as much you get. More simply: you get what you pay for.
Wishing you all the best,
Liza
| | | | dmoamin
United States
Local time: 00:45
Arabic to English
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TOPIC STARTER | Thank you Liza | Aug 31, 2008 |
Dear Liza,
Thank you so much for your advice and nice words. You are right. I should work harder on these things if I want to make a living as a translator , I don’t do translation as a full time job, but, I am planning on doing so in the future. Right now, I do it only for practice and to keep up with the business and also because I like it a lot. In many cases, if I believe in the case behind the translation such as AIDS or other humane related translations, I don’t even charg... See more Dear Liza,
Thank you so much for your advice and nice words. You are right. I should work harder on these things if I want to make a living as a translator , I don’t do translation as a full time job, but, I am planning on doing so in the future. Right now, I do it only for practice and to keep up with the business and also because I like it a lot. In many cases, if I believe in the case behind the translation such as AIDS or other humane related translations, I don’t even charge. I like to do it for the " good" that it reflects. I have my other full time job and I am really happy with it too. But, I believe we all work to reach the opportunity that allows us to open our own business. I been working as a translator for a while but not as a full time translator and not on daily basis, It has been mainly large projects dealing directly with clients and some of the translation agencies. I really enjoy it and love translating and I should put more effort into learning more about this business.
Thank you for your help I really appreciate it and your point is well taken. ▲ Collapse
| | | | lbone
China
Local time: 15:45
Member (2006)
English to Chinese
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It depends.
I am usually slow at start, and the speed increases when I am familiar with that topic and that client.
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NMR (X)
France
Local time: 09:45
French to Dutch
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lbone wrote:
It depends.
I am usually slow at start, and the speed increases when I am familiar with that topic and that client.
1000 - 4000 words. Average speed about 2,500 but maximum about 4,000. I once translated 8,000 in one day, but it was a 30-hour working day :gr:
| | | | | I translate 3000 words per day | Oct 2, 2008 |
I ever translated over ten thousand words (Chinese) within 24 hours. But that was absolutely tired and boresome. So, now I usually translate 3000 words per day, since this is easy for me and is also good for my health.
| | | | | Different for different language pairs | Nov 19, 2008 |
In one of my language pairs, I consider 2500 words/day enough (but can do more, if really needed), in the other I do 4000/day with a smile on my lips. So it also depends on the similarity the language pairs have regarding sentence and mind structure and your own familiarity. Even among European languages...
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