How many words per day would you be able to translate?

[Kyriakos]

Added part: Assuming you are translating literature/fiction.

Asking, on account of currently having been through 30K words, and having another 20K till the end...

It is a bit tiring, and i had asked for 50 days to do the whole thing. It probably would have been easier if i had been translating 1000 words/day since then, but that didn't happen, so i spent even a couple of days translating 4K/day!

I now have 21 days left, so it's again 1000/day.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I translate from "internet English" to "English Valka understands" every day. Not sure how many words.

I used to translate between lolspeak and English every day as well, until the Cheezburger site went under new ownership and the owners don't give a damn about fixing the parts of the site that are broken. They've lost a lot of the older, funnier, more prolific contributors.

Between English and French... not that much, since college.

Between Greek and English? The number of words in my lifetime are fewer than a couple of dozen (not counting the alphabet and what we've discussed of your books and stories). So you're faster at it than I am, by far.

 

[Broken_Erika]

1 5p34|< 50|\/|3 l337....
translation-----
i speak some l337...

 

[The_J]

~1 word page per hour. 1.5h if it needs to be perfect (that's English to German).
No clue how much fits on a word apge though ^^.

 

[Honor]

I am pretty slow to write anything - not good for an academic, but it is what it is. I'd say half a page a day, however many characters that is.

 

[Kyriakos]

The typical page usually has 350-450 words. 1000 words/day is ok, if a bit tiresome, but 4000/day is HELL.

 

[EnglishEdward]

I suspect that it would rather depend whether I was being paid by the word or by the day.

 

[Kyriakos]

I suspect that it would rather depend whether I was being paid by the word or by the day.

I am paid by the word. For 51K words.

 

[uppi]

I do not think this questions can be answered independent of the text in question. A simple and clear text on a subject you are familiar with is much easier to translate than a text with a lot of ambiguity and hidden meanings for which you need a few hours first to get a grasp on what it is supposed to mean.

 

[Kyriakos]

Well, yes, but assuming it is not jargon but a literary translation (alluded to in the OP, not its title ).

(edit, actually i didn't say so in the OP, so went back and added it now )

 

[sophie]

Hmm, depends on how long a "day" is, which language I'm translating from, the sophistication of the work I'm translating, and the purpose of my translation.

If I'm reading casual German literature for my own personal amusement where semantic and linguistic nuance isn't so important and nobody's going to be scrutinizing my work, then the quality can be more lax and I can more or less translate on the fly at around the same pace as I read the work itself.

If I'm translating Ovid or Augustine or the Carmina Burana for the purpose of writing an academic paper in which I'm conducting a close-reading analysis of the work and its author then I'm going to be going WAY slower as I have to take each word and sentence and their relative semantic impact into careful consideration, particularly considering my intended audience will be able to read Latin at an extremely high level and will likewise be scrutinizing my work and its findings closely. In that case it might take me several hours to process even a handful of lines.

 

[The_J]

The typical page usually has 350-450 words. 1000 words/day is ok, if a bit tiresome, but 4000/day is HELL.

Never did it for that long actually ^^.
Well...okay, a few times. I translated 1 or 2 scientific publications into German because I wasn't comfortable reading them in English (that was at the very beginning of my B.sc., so long time ago), and that's like each 6 PDF pages.
I've translated some stuff for FfH2 here, and did there roughly 2 pages max on a day (and not too many either).
I'd definitely not want to do this for a living ^^.

 

[Lohrenswald]

I imagine that the longer the entire piece I'd have to translate would be, the longer it would take to translate each page (or to put it another way, the ratio of time per fixed amount of text would increase)
It's like monotenous and unengaging work

 

[Broken_Erika]

Just use google translate, the results should be.......interesting. Especially if you translate it to a few other languages first before translating it to english.

 

[Kyriakos]

Just use google translate, the results should be.......interesting. Especially if you translate it to a few other languages first before translating it to english.

It won't work at all, for english--->greek, due to massive differences in grammar and syntax. Infact it might work slightly better for german--->greek, but would still be pretty useless.

 

[The_J]

I imagine that the longer the entire piece I'd have to translate would be, the longer it would take to translate each page (or to put it another way, the ratio of time per fixed amount of text would increase)

That's probably true.
You'll need to pay attention to be consistent with names, phrases and terms which just refer to the same thing.
The longer it gets, the more hidden meaning it might also have, where you'll need to figure out if the whole thing is translatable at all.

 

[Kyriakos]

That's probably true.
You'll need to pay attention to be consistent with names, phrases and terms which just refer to the same thing.
The longer it gets, the more hidden meaning it might also have, where you'll need to figure out if the whole thing is translatable at all.

This is Kafka; i already know all those works and have read of them many times before ^^

 

[Zelig]

It won't work at all, for english--->greek, due to massive differences in grammar and syntax.

Temporary problem.

There's no reason to believe machine translation won't improve more in the next twenty years than it has in the past twenty years. And then the twenty years after that. And then the twenty years after that again. And so on.

Grammar and syntax differences aren't particularly relevant to neural networks.