Quick Translation

Quick Translation

Everybody in the translation business can tell you about customers who want translations produced very quickly. The stories are endless.

Most translators can type anything from 2500 words to 4000 words in a day, but often that is too slow to satisfy the requirements of a customer faced with an emergency situation.

Often a translation agency will split  large translations which are required urgently between several translators, but in this case the problem of harmonising vocabulary can become quite difficult to solve and this is where computer translation memories come into their own.

For an experienced translator, the number of words he or she can produce per day can be considerably increased by using dictation. With the advent of small hand-held digital recorders with computer access, it becomes possible to send a dictation to a typist by email, have the typist type the translation in Word and then receive it back again by email. Of course, when the typed translation is received back from the typist, it has to be carefully proof-read and corrected where necessary.

Personally, I can speak much faster than I can write so I can send a dictation of 5000 words to one typist, send the second 5000 to a second typist, and so on. This makes it possible to translate well over 10,000 words per day.

Another way to produce translations very quickly is to use one of the speech recognition programs which have seen a lot of improvement over the last few years. Using one of these systems, the translator speaks into a microphone and the words appear on the computer screen. Some correction is always needed, but the system can work just as fast as one can speak.

There is another way of approaching the typing problem, which is to dictate to one of the computer speech recognition programs, where the words are typed by the computer directly on the screen. These programs have seen a great deal of improvement recently.

This dictation process becomes easier with experience and it does offer real savings in time.

And after all, it’s our time that we are selling in the translation business

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