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4000 words per day?
Thread poster: Rebecca Hansford
Jennifer Forbes
Jennifer Forbes  Identity Verified
Local time: 13:26
French to English
+ ...
In memoriam
Interruptions and productivity Mar 9, 2012

Now that I'm a freelancer working in the calm of my own home office, I can do 4,000 words a day on a familiar subject - I'm a touch-typist, which helps.
However, when I was an employee my productivity was much lower because of the constant interruptions of office life - answering phones, manning the reception desk when the charming but lazy receptionist was on one of her frequent breaks, etc.
With an in-house job, you might find you were expected to do other tasks as well as translat
... See more
Now that I'm a freelancer working in the calm of my own home office, I can do 4,000 words a day on a familiar subject - I'm a touch-typist, which helps.
However, when I was an employee my productivity was much lower because of the constant interruptions of office life - answering phones, manning the reception desk when the charming but lazy receptionist was on one of her frequent breaks, etc.
With an in-house job, you might find you were expected to do other tasks as well as translation, such as those mentioned above, plus secretarial work, making and serving coffees, etc., which would certainly affect your concentration, reduce your productivity and put you under stress.
Oh, it's the freelance life for me!
Best wishes,
Jenny
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Erik Freitag
Erik Freitag  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 14:26
Member (2006)
Dutch to German
+ ...
Personal working speed Mar 9, 2012

I generally agree with Krzysztof here.

It's no wonder that we keep hearing people complain about the low income of translators. I can comfortably translate much more than the 2.000 words-per-day "standard" that is often mentioned, without any sacrifice to quality.

That's why I can offer word rates that fall well in the average range reported in the relevant proz section, while not having to complain about my income.

While my clients usually don't complain
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I generally agree with Krzysztof here.

It's no wonder that we keep hearing people complain about the low income of translators. I can comfortably translate much more than the 2.000 words-per-day "standard" that is often mentioned, without any sacrifice to quality.

That's why I can offer word rates that fall well in the average range reported in the relevant proz section, while not having to complain about my income.

While my clients usually don't complain about my word rates, they are sometimes shocked when I tell them my hourly rate. However, both are astoundingly consistent, which means I earn approximately the same whether I charge per hour or per word (and that's the way it should be). As soon as my clients see that they don't pay more than they'd pay for a slower translator with a lower hourly rate, and when they get excellent quality for their money, they're happy with my hourly rate.

It's interesting that we see discussions about rates a lot more frequently than threads about working speed, while in reality, both are very closely related.
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Rebecca Hansford
Rebecca Hansford  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:26
Italian to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
particularities Mar 9, 2012

The particular contract in question would require doing translation in the morning (so aiming for 1800 words as the target in 4 hours) and project management in the afternoon without any fixed hours.

The other translators do 4000 words per day within fixed hours so this was why I wanted to know if others think it is a manageable amount.


 
Claire Cox
Claire Cox
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:26
French to English
+ ...
Depends Mar 9, 2012

As others have said, much depends on the subject and your familiarity with it. I dictate and can do 4000 words a day quite easily, but not proof-read as a general rule. The most I've ever done was 9000 in a day, again not checked, but I certainly wouldn't offer to do that on a regular basis! That said, there are some jobs, like tables, spreadhseets, Powerpoint files or pdf conversions, which are much more fiddly and you might struggle to reach 2000 words a day. It seems a harsh indicator of your... See more
As others have said, much depends on the subject and your familiarity with it. I dictate and can do 4000 words a day quite easily, but not proof-read as a general rule. The most I've ever done was 9000 in a day, again not checked, but I certainly wouldn't offer to do that on a regular basis! That said, there are some jobs, like tables, spreadhseets, Powerpoint files or pdf conversions, which are much more fiddly and you might struggle to reach 2000 words a day. It seems a harsh indicator of your value to the agency.Collapse


 
Sheila Wilson
Sheila Wilson  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 13:26
Member (2007)
English
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Slave-driver? Mar 9, 2012

rhansf1 wrote:
The particular contract in question would require doing translation in the morning (so aiming for 1800 words as the target in 4 hours) and project management in the afternoon without any fixed hours.


That sounds like an unenviable job if, as a lot of people have said here, 4000 words is difficult to sustain day in day out. Project management might become a matter of whipping the translators to make them work harder, and apologising to clients for the late delivery of their translations.

It's just a personal opinion, but I wouldn't like to be in that position.

Sheila


 
Cristina Lo Bianco
Cristina Lo Bianco  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 14:26
Member (2008)
English to Italian
+ ...
It depends Mar 9, 2012

Jin Chang wrote:
My general ruld of thumb on translation is "word count per day is based on the subject."


I agree.

I've just checked my record and my hourly productivity measured in "equivalent words"* ranges from 184 to 569.

(*the number of words you get if you weight the number of new words, fuzzy matches, etc against the same percentages you apply to the rates).

Ciao,
Cristina


 
Pascal Zotto
Pascal Zotto  Identity Verified
Austria
Local time: 14:26
Member (2009)
Dutch to Luxembourgish
+ ...
depends on many factors Mar 9, 2012

Hi,

it is possible. For me depending on language combination and working field, and the respective helping tools I can use I can produce between 400-2500 words per hour. Whereas the average output for me is around 900 per hour with publishing quality. But I know that I represent a very rare minority with this output, so far I only know 1 more person capable of such outputs and high quality.

So on average you can take 2000 - 2500 per day as standard.

Regards
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Hi,

it is possible. For me depending on language combination and working field, and the respective helping tools I can use I can produce between 400-2500 words per hour. Whereas the average output for me is around 900 per hour with publishing quality. But I know that I represent a very rare minority with this output, so far I only know 1 more person capable of such outputs and high quality.

So on average you can take 2000 - 2500 per day as standard.

Regards,
Pascal
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Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:26
Member (2004)
English to Italian
Feasible... Mar 9, 2012

but you will be going home very late every night...

 
Sanna Koo
Sanna Koo  Identity Verified
Finland
Local time: 15:26
Finnish to English
+ ...
Depends on the language Mar 9, 2012

Krzysztof Kajetanowicz wrote:

This post is 172 words long.

[Edited at 2012-03-09 08:43 GMT]


Just to amuse myself on a Friday afternoon I translated Krzysztof's post into my mother tongue, Finnish, and suddenly the post is only 126 words long. Quite a difference in such a short text, and the difference will obviously be much grater the longer the text.
I find it very odd that in-house translators would have a precise number of words to translate each day "before they can go home". Translators are highly qualified experts, not sweat shop factory workers, and this kind of thinking shows serious lack of respect.


 
mirellebelle (X)
mirellebelle (X)
Local time: 14:26
Dutch to English
Quantity over quality?? Mar 9, 2012

Going for 4000 words a days sounds like a bit of a reach... I've been an in-house translator for four years now and my average is 3000 words a day. Then again it depends on the difficulty of the text and whether you need to keep other things in mind such as SEO.

 
John Fossey
John Fossey  Identity Verified
Canada
Local time: 09:26
Member (2008)
French to English
+ ...
Agree Mar 9, 2012

Sanna Koo wrote:

I find it very odd that in-house translators would have a precise number of words to translate each day "before they can go home". Translators are highly qualified experts, not sweat shop factory workers, and this kind of thinking shows serious lack of respect.


Agree totally. The profession needs to be upgraded, first in our eyes and consequently in the eyes of our clients/employers.

As mentioned elsewhere, we are not pieceworkers, we are intellectual service providers. While a words/day count is valuable for the purposes of calculating costs, schedules, etc., to tie it numerically to employment conditions seems demeaning and unrealistic and must indicate something about the employer's relations with its staff.


 
Hege Jakobsen Lepri
Hege Jakobsen Lepri  Identity Verified
Norway
Local time: 14:26
Member (2002)
English to Norwegian
+ ...
sometimes these posts turn into a competition of "who's go the biggest..." Mar 9, 2012

"I can produce between 400-2500 words per hour."

"in my opinion you could --perhaps-- produce not only 4,000, but even more in an 8-hour day"

"10k a day for more than 1-2 days would kill me - but 4-5k a day would be realistic even for the long haul. Maybe 6k"

With this kind of productivity I expect you're either heading for the Forbes 500 very quickly, or you're leaving something out of the story.


 
Christine Andersen
Christine Andersen  Identity Verified
Denmark
Local time: 14:26
Member (2003)
Danish to English
+ ...
The Danes call it selling elastic by the metre Mar 9, 2012

When I was in house, we aimed at 2000 words a day on average, and those were English words.

I was a beginner, so if the jobs were demanding, that was hard, but later on I did on rare occasions get up to 4000 a day - the first time was some chit-chat for a tourist magazine, just blue skies, sunny beaches and charming hotels, not much checking terminology etc.

Other days, the agency used to give us one-liners, making out glossaries to send to freelancers as well as using
... See more
When I was in house, we aimed at 2000 words a day on average, and those were English words.

I was a beginner, so if the jobs were demanding, that was hard, but later on I did on rare occasions get up to 4000 a day - the first time was some chit-chat for a tourist magazine, just blue skies, sunny beaches and charming hotels, not much checking terminology etc.

Other days, the agency used to give us one-liners, making out glossaries to send to freelancers as well as using them ourselves, checking, checking and checking with clients...

It was good training. We were paid, whether we did any work or not! But we were never short of work. The boss used to complain that we were expensive, but he did understand why. That was the sort of thing that made it a good agency - and kept the clients coming back.

We did the jobs that the freelancers refused because they take ages, and your word-per-hour rate is low...
________________

When I started freelancing, I changed over from counting target words to counting source words.

And then I really had to work HARD to get up to the 2000 a day.
Now I was conting Danish words, and Scandinavian languages have a different structure, so on average 1000 Scandinavian words translate into around 1200 English words.
Check your own language pairs!

And then there are days when you spend more time checking terminology than translating...
4000 words a day sounds a lot to me, and I would never take that on in my languages.
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Neil Coffey
Neil Coffey  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:26
French to English
+ ...
"'burst' speed under specific circumstances" != "expect to sustain" Mar 9, 2012

I'm sure every translator can think of certain projects they've translated where they've got up to 4,000 words/day for a couple of days on that specific project. In my case, I'd probably list meeting transcripts consisting largely of readily translatable 'conversational' language, IT protocol specifications where there tends to be a lot of repetition, even certain types of contract that have a lot of standard 'boilerplate' text etc.

But being able to "burst" at 4,000 words/day under
... See more
I'm sure every translator can think of certain projects they've translated where they've got up to 4,000 words/day for a couple of days on that specific project. In my case, I'd probably list meeting transcripts consisting largely of readily translatable 'conversational' language, IT protocol specifications where there tends to be a lot of repetition, even certain types of contract that have a lot of standard 'boilerplate' text etc.

But being able to "burst" at 4,000 words/day under specific circumstances is quite different from signing a contract indicating that that is your EXPECTED throughput a priori.

Even with the knowledge that it's sometimes possible, I would never base a quote to a client on anything much above 2,000 words/day simply because I can't *expect* that a priori. If it turns out that a text is quicker than I thought, then lucky me. But the idea of *expecting* to translate 4,000 words/day sounds absurd.
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Walter Landesman
Walter Landesman  Identity Verified
Uruguay
Local time: 10:26
English to Spanish
+ ...
Totally agree. Mar 9, 2012

Neil Coffey wrote:

I'm sure every translator can think of certain projects they've translated where they've got up to 4,000 words/day for a couple of days on that specific project. In my case, I'd probably list meeting transcripts consisting largely of readily translatable 'conversational' language, IT protocol specifications where there tends to be a lot of repetition, even certain types of contract that have a lot of standard 'boilerplate' text etc.

But being able to "burst" at 4,000 words/day under specific circumstances is quite different from signing a contract indicating that that is your EXPECTED throughput a priori.

Even with the knowledge that it's sometimes possible, I would never base a quote to a client on anything much above 2,000 words/day simply because I can't *expect* that a priori. If it turns out that a text is quicker than I thought, then lucky me. But the idea of *expecting* to translate 4,000 words/day sounds absurd.


Ditto.


 
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