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How many words per day
Thread poster: delphinedh
Terry Richards
Terry Richards
France
Local time: 20:11
French to English
+ ...
For a business plan... May 18, 2011

You would be better off with a monthly figure which automatically takes into account overhead time, down time and other factors.

I keep detailled records and, over the last 12 months, I averaged about 50-60,000 words per month. It has taken me about 5 years to reach that level and when I started I was doing about 1/2 that rate. If you start at 25,000 and assume straight line growth to 50,000 over 5 years you would get a fairly accurate picture of the graph in my spreadsheet.
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You would be better off with a monthly figure which automatically takes into account overhead time, down time and other factors.

I keep detailled records and, over the last 12 months, I averaged about 50-60,000 words per month. It has taken me about 5 years to reach that level and when I started I was doing about 1/2 that rate. If you start at 25,000 and assume straight line growth to 50,000 over 5 years you would get a fairly accurate picture of the graph in my spreadsheet.

I have no idea how that compares with other people but, by what I am told by agencies, I'm quite quick on my turnround so you might want to scale that by some factor you think is appropriate.

I translate French to English exclusively and 90% of my work is in IT and engineering which I am very familiar with. The other 10% is general tourist stuff and quite easy. I do not work in any other specialised fields and I work exclusively for agencies.

Terry.
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Sheila Wilson
Sheila Wilson  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 19:11
Member (2007)
English
+ ...
800 words per day? May 18, 2011

Krzysztof Kajetanowicz wrote:
By the way, 800 words a day is a very low throughput in my opinion, even for a beginner.


I agree. It would make for a nice, comfortable life, with plenty of time for research, checking, admin, marketing and still plenty of time left for leisure and the family. If only ...


 
Gerard de Noord
Gerard de Noord  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 20:11
Member (2003)
English to Dutch
+ ...
I'm proud of all previous contributions May 18, 2011

Hi Delphine,

The estimates you have received so far are very realistic. Translating 1,500 words a day, 7,500 words a week, 30,000 words a month is both realistic and ambitious for a first business plan. I've been a full-time translator for over 10 years but I didn't translate nearly as much as 30,000 words in April.

The math is simple: 30,000 x 10 months = 300,000 words per year, so a full-time translator could easily turn over in between 30,000 and 40,000 euro a year,
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Hi Delphine,

The estimates you have received so far are very realistic. Translating 1,500 words a day, 7,500 words a week, 30,000 words a month is both realistic and ambitious for a first business plan. I've been a full-time translator for over 10 years but I didn't translate nearly as much as 30,000 words in April.

The math is simple: 30,000 x 10 months = 300,000 words per year, so a full-time translator could easily turn over in between 30,000 and 40,000 euro a year, without ever getting tired. In practice you will have to make up for every idle hour, day or week you will experience, or not reach those 300,000 words.

Don't you worry, you will find out how fast you can translate within a year, and you will get even faster with time. But never consider your maximum throughput as your daily throughput. And never communicate it or calculate with it.

Cheers,
Gerard

[Edited at 2011-05-18 22:05 GMT]
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Sumit Sarkar
Sumit Sarkar  Identity Verified
India
Local time: 00:41
Member
English to Bengali
+ ...
That is a breaking news ;) May 19, 2011

Williamson wrote:

I speak a lot faster than I type.


What a breaking new. Keep it up.


 
delphinedh
delphinedh
Local time: 20:11
Dutch to French
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
thank you May 19, 2011

Thank you everybody, your replies are very usefull to me!

 
Adam Warren
Adam Warren  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 20:11
Member (2005)
French to English
I too post about 2500 words per day May 19, 2011

philgoddard wrote:

People will tell you they can churn out 6,000 words or more a day, but they're the exception rather than the rule. My record is 7,000, but that was dictating, and it was a long day.


That figure is a benchmark you can use to obtain a rule-of-thumb estimate of the length of a job in man-days (in a gender-neutral sense, obviously:-)!.

I should state that this is for French into English, unleveraged for Trados, and I can yield a roughly concurring 7000 words in a single long and weary day's dictation, not a sustained output, of course.

For a starting translator, I can't remember any statistics - I think they came later. And besides, my experience is probably not relevant, because this was in the days of hard-copy and typebar typewriters, with an IBM golfball typewriter for the most privileged.

As a staff translator at the OECD, I must have averaged 15 rough-copy pages per day: one of these holds 125 words. There was a lot of research involved: everything had to match the records, whether the Organisation's own, or those of sister organisations and governments.

I hope these stats. help.

With kind regards,

Adam Warren
(IanDhu - 41189)


 
Williamson
Williamson  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:11
Flemish to English
+ ...
Enter the dragon May 20, 2011

Sumit1970 wrote:

Williamson wrote:

I speak a lot faster than I type.


What a breaking new. Keep it up.


I referred to voice-recognition and on-sight translation.
The average speed of speaking is 120 words per minute and a bullet-speed speaker produces even more words.



[Edited at 2011-05-20 07:34 GMT]


 
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