We Need This Translated Urgently!

Yes, I know: when the project started, nobody thought about translation, and now the deadline is close and it turns out the report, presentation or video needed translating, preferably yesterday. Let's work out how much text can be translated in a working day without losing quality.

A case from our practice

A client called us recently. During the conversation it turned out that the report, an analysis of digitalization legislation, ran to 260 pages and had to be translated in two days, Friday and Saturday. The client also mentioned they didn't want to go back to their previous agency after a bad experience: donors had complained about "Google Translate".

Cutting corners isn't our style. We were ready to translate that volume, but in no less than 12 working days rather than two. That didn't suit the client. "Is there really no way? Maybe you could try?" I answered honestly: "It's possible to translate that volume, but forget about quality, consistent terminology and a single style. You'll probably find an agency that agrees to do it in two days. But they'll put 20 or 25 translators on the project, each will translate in their own way, and you'll get a patchwork quilt instead of a coherent legal text."

Deadlines and volumes

Now to the question of a reasonable workload and deadlines. Speed varies with the complexity of the text, the translator's skills and how deeply they know the subject.

More on how long a translation takes.

Daily output can range from a comfortable 4 standard pages to a fantastic 18. From my own experience, translating 18 pages in a day is sheer torture. But sometimes there's no other way. You can't keep up that pace for long without your health suffering.

At an average pace that you can sustain all week, keep the quality high and avoid burnout, the daily norm is 6 to 8 standard pages. The standard allowance is an hour per page, and experienced colleagues will confirm that 6 to 8 pages a day is a professional translator's cruising speed. Push past it and concentration drops, and quality drops with it.

How many translators to put on a project

Now about teamwork. Urgent and large projects really do need a team of translators. But a few conditions must be met, or the end result will sound like a cat choir:

• You need a well-coordinated, permanent team of reliable translators.
• A glossary must be compiled, before translation starts or along the way.
• All difficult points must be discussed by the team and added to the project reference.
• At the end, an editor must review the whole text to smooth out the rough edges, bring it to one style and fix the purely human mistakes that a tired eye misses.

So how many translators can work on one project: 5, 10, 20 or 30? This is where the human factor comes in. The more translators, the more likely something goes wrong. Here's what an oversized team can lead to:

• Missed deadlines. A translator can fall ill or simply drop the project, which is why a well-coordinated team of reliable specialists matters, without random freelancers found in a hurry and never tested in real work.
• Ignored instructions. Even the most responsible translators can forget the project instructions we usually set out in a style guide. In a big team such mistakes multiply, and fixing them eats up precious time.
• Different skill levels and styles. The more translators involved, the more the parts of the text differ from each other. We're all different: someone specializes in legal documents but knows little about engineering or finance, while one project may cover several subjects. That's why a huge team is not the way to a confident, consistent translation.

Through experience I've found that a team of 5 to 7 translators handles large projects best, and ideally 2 or 3. We have had orders where we brought in 10 or even 12 people, but the editing effort on those texts went beyond all reasonable limits.

So we follow a simple rule: if we can't handle an order with our close-knit team, we'd rather turn the project down than deliver a poor translation or miss the deadline.

In conclusion

So how much can we translate in a day? With the whole team working, about 40 pages in 8 hours, plus another day for proofreading and editing. Of course, that depends on our current workload: we usually run several projects in parallel, and not every translator may be available.