Translation Speed

As I stare down the barrel of possibly translating a novel that may well end up being more than a million words long, I was slightly reassured to come across this article discussing translation speed among professional translators. A good number of the translators quoted in the article seem to agree that 800 to 1,000 words per day as an average makes sense. Interestingly, most of them do not report getting noticeably faster at translation with time and experience.

I generally think of myself as being quite slow, but honestly towards the middle and end of translating Purely by Accident, I was translating on average about 500 to 600 words per day (first draft), and I'm not even doing it full time. Purely by Accident took me three years and a bit to finish translating, and it's about 185,000 words long in Chinese. So I was actually averaging 60,000 words' worth of translation (including first draft, second draft and revisions) per year. That's about the length of a short novel, in Western publishing. So really, the issue is not that I'm slow; it's that c-novels are long.

This, of course, doesn't solve the problem that I might be spending the next six years of my life translating a single novel, but it does make me feel ever so slightly better.