This is an important question, since it is standard in the industry to add a surcharge to your regular rate for a "rush job." It is accepted that the average pro translator translates about 2,000 words a day. We've all done more than this for important jobs but I personally don't think it's realistic to do much more on a daily basis. Quality may begin to suffer and, more importantly, we should not forget that translators are human beings who are subject to eye strain, RSI, backaches and burn-out.
Translation is a job that demands intense concentration on a single task for extended periods. The human brain is simply not capable of putting in 10-hour workdays in the long run.
Most pro translators are very comfortable with a daily output of 2,000 fully polished words and many would call this a breeze. (This is true even if they are not using CATs.)
Rookie translators, on the other hand, almost faint for when they hear this. They may be averaging just 200 words per hour, and they find each word an intellectual strain, so they cannot translate for many hours in a row.
How do you do it? they ask, in a state of fear and awe.
I have tried to explain to students many times how this works, but I never managed to describe it so well as the following passage which I read recently in Becoming a Translator
by Douglas Robinson.At first glance the desires to translate faster and translate reliably might seem to be at odds with one another. One commonsensical assumption says that the faster you do something, the more likely you are to make mistakes; the more slowly you work, the more likely that work is to be reliable. The reliable translator shouldn't make (major) mistakes, so s/he shouldn't try to translate fast.
But increased speed, at least up to a point, really only damages reliability when you are doing something new or unfamiliar, something that requires concentration, which always takes time. "Old" and "familiar" actions, especially habitual actions, can be performed both quickly and reliably because habit takes over. You're late in the morning, so you brush your teeth, tie your shoes, throw on your coat, grab your keys and wallet or purse and run for the door, start the car and get on the road, all in about two minutes - and you don't forget anything, you don't mistie your shoes, grab a fork and spoon instead of your keys, because you've done all these things so many times before that your body knows what to do, and does it.
And there are important parallels between this "bodily memory" and translation. Experienced translators are fast because they have translated so much that it often seems as if their "brain" isn't doing the translating - their fingers are. They recognize a familiar source-language structure and barely pause before their fingers are racing across the keyboard, rendering it into a well-worn target-language structural equivalent, fitted with lexical items that seem to come to them automatically without any conscious thought or logical analysis.
Thank you, Prof. Robinson, I really enjoyed this description of how I, and many translators who been doing this for years, experience the process.
If you are not at this point yet and find that every job feels like a "rush job," take heart. Just keep translating and one day you too will find that 2,000 words is a breeze.
