| Páxinas no tema: [1 2 3] > | Poll: How many words have you translated in your career? Persoa que publicou o fío: ProZ.com Staff
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This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "How many words have you translated in your career?".
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| | | | Ventnai 
Spain
Local time: 20:39
German to English
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| A rough guess | May 6, 2021 |
I don't keep track but a very rough guess would be some 8 million calculated based on the number of years I have been translating and allowing for holidays and (infrequent) quiet periods.
[Bearbeitet am 2021-05-06 20:33 GMT]
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I started translating full-time some 35 years ago after a few years part-time. I worked for 20 years as staff translator between 1986 and 2006 and since I retired from that position I have been working as a freelancer. I have no idea of the amount translated until 2007 as I didn’t keep track, but since 2007 until the end of 2020 I’ve translated 6,975,445 words (4 source languages into PT(pt) though over 60% refers to EN-PT). No CAT tools!
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:39
Membro (2008)
Italian to English
| Dumb, dumber, and dumbest | May 6, 2021 |
Q: How many words have you translated in your career?
A: That must surely qualitfy as the dumbest poll question ever. Equivalent to asking "how many breaths have you taken since you were born?"
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Baran Keki
Türkiye
Local time: 22:39
Membro
English to Turkish
| More than you've had hot dinners... | May 6, 2021 |
At a conservative estimate...
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I would estimate that I have translated around 14 million words (10,000 a week x 50 weeks x 28 years).
No wonder I’m so damned good.
Not a stupid question at all.
| | | | | How do you define a word? | May 6, 2021 |
How many words is a word?
German is well known for stringing words together to make new words - as in crossroads, railway, checklist - they exist, but to a far lesser extent in English. You get fewer words if you translate from English into German, so which language do you count?
My source language, Danish, does the same, though possibly not quite as much as German. On the other hand, the definite article is not always a separate word: it is added as an ending to the no... See more How many words is a word?
German is well known for stringing words together to make new words - as in crossroads, railway, checklist - they exist, but to a far lesser extent in English. You get fewer words if you translate from English into German, so which language do you count?
My source language, Danish, does the same, though possibly not quite as much as German. On the other hand, the definite article is not always a separate word: it is added as an ending to the noun.
cat = kat
the cat = katten
the cats = kattene
On average you get about 1200 English words for 1000 Danish words, and the differences are even greater in some language pairs. Each language will have features that affect the word count.
And then there is all the sport of "Trados discounts". Regardless of how you charge for them, how many times do you count repeats that a CAT tool can in principle translate for you?
Even if you don't use a CAT, how many times do you count standard phrases like 'Yours sincerely' - or 'best regards'
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Not Applicable
-- and all the others.
I have records of what clients have paid me for over the years, but they do not all count words the same way, and I have never added them up. I made a guesstimate over a couple of years when I applied to be a Chartered Linguist, but it was largely to show that I was working professionally and more or less full time, and could not be used for other purposes.
[Edited at 2021-05-06 16:30 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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5-10M, or an equivalent of 4-500,000 full words/year over 21 years. The more, the merrier.
Converting words into books, it's still far less than the average city library.
To be compared with the 2.7 billions of "words" on my computer.
Philippe
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| Over 20 million | May 6, 2021 |
I've counted them...
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 20:39
Membro (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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| Not all work is translation | May 6, 2021 |
A lot of my work involves checking translations done by other translators, so the number of words that I "translated" would be less than if I had done only translations. And I obviously process more words when editing than when translating, so even if I could add up all my TMs from the past two decades, remove duplicates and count the words, it would still give a very inaccurate picture.
| | | | Daniel Frisano
Italy
Local time: 20:39
Membro (2008)
English to Italian
+ ...
If you don't know how many words you translate, or can't even define what a word is, how do you bill? By square centimeter?
[Edited at 2021-05-06 12:59 GMT]
| | | | IrinaN
United States
Local time: 13:39
English to Russian
+ ...
| Daniel, what's eating you?!?!?! | May 6, 2021 |
Daniel Frisano wrote:
If you don't know how many words you translate
Another one?
How in the world we, les miserables, are allowed to contaminate Planet Earth?
You know all too well what people mean - "... have you translated in your career."
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Daniel Frisano wrote:
If you don't know how many words you translate, or can't even define what a word is, how do you bill? By square centimeter?
[Edited at 2021-05-06 12:59 GMT]
In this context there are a number of ways you could define a word. Source or target, for example. Weighted words or just the total number of words processed.
Some translators also prefer to charge an hourly rate or project fee. German translators often charge by the line.
Number of words is not the only option by any means
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Since I went full time freelance in 2017 my very crude estimate would be that I translate about 20,000 words per week on average, that would be around a million words per year, for a total of 4 million. My part-time career before that is even more difficult to calculate.
I also did a calculation for Tom and found that I have probably taken around 465 million breaths since I was born, give or take a dozen millions. And counting.
That means that I have needed more than 10... See more Since I went full time freelance in 2017 my very crude estimate would be that I translate about 20,000 words per week on average, that would be around a million words per year, for a total of 4 million. My part-time career before that is even more difficult to calculate.
I also did a calculation for Tom and found that I have probably taken around 465 million breaths since I was born, give or take a dozen millions. And counting.
That means that I have needed more than 100 breaths per translated word in my life so far, which is not so great, but I believe I can improve on this. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:39
Membro (2008)
Italian to English
| How do you define a word? | May 6, 2021 |
To put it in Wittgensteinian terms: is this < a word? How do you know?
[Edited at 2021-05-06 13:49 GMT]
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