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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.
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.
no subject
:O
So really, the issue is not that I'm slow; it's that c-novels are long.
This is my pain as a reader who likes reading but not reading that much lol.
I also think that a lot of the fantranslation culture is to prioritize speed and quantity with little interest for the quality/readability, and that skews speed expectations (at least, in the fandom sphere, where one has to compete with the speed of MTL)...
Btw it's really cool that you're able to track your pace like this! Numbers are usually meaningless to me so posts like this are a useful frame of reference.
Good luck with your new project(s)!
no subject
I really can't/don't see myself trying to do it any faster than my current pace. For one I don't want to compromise on quality, and for another I want to enjoy the process, which I absolutely cannot do if I'm just trying to get words out as quickly as possible.
It's been a helpful exercise working out where I am speed-wise! And working out that I'm definitely not the problem, it's not me.