Comment by Vivtek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Vivtek | Hacker News Reader

At 10 cents a word, the typical 2000-word-a-day professional freelance translator with the standard 250-working-day freelance year is making $50K US. If you're going through an agency charging that little, which he seems to imply, then you're also getting a proofreader to ensure consistency and quality, at about 20% of the take, and a manager, for some unspecified amount of the take, but let's call it 5% management overhead for the sake of argument (it can't be much more than that if the total word price is only 10 cents).

Now your professional translator is taking home $37.5K US, before taxes, before health insurance, and before retirement plans.

Translators are by no means raking in big dough. Well, some of us do OK - I translate a hell of a lot more than 2000 words a day - but your average translator is by no means overpriced, in terms of how much effort actually goes into working with two languages in your head at once and not being a complete nincompoop with whatever subject domain is involved in the job in question. (Of course, I'm speaking as a technical translator, where domain knowledge or the ability to fake it is a significant asset. YMMV for general topics.)

This is a tremendously great hack and food for thought, but there is no way I'd trust a business model to it as it stands.

At a luxurious 10 seconds a word, you would translate your 2000 words a day in approximately 5.5 hours. I think 10 seconds a word gives you enough time to translate one word, play one move of chess, and repeat. You could get really good at chess this way.

At a luxurious 10 seconds a LOC, you would write your 2000 LOC a day in approximately 5.5 hours. I think 10 seconds a LOC gives you enough time to write one command, play one move of chess, and repeat. You could get really good at chess this way. SCNR.

I think you've never done translation.

I do about 4000 words in a nominal working day, and by the standards of the industry I am hell on wheels, to the point that when I need backup on a job because of scheduling difficulties I can't find it because I literally don't know anybody else in the world that works as fast as I do.

2000 words a day is not lounging, and it's not 5.5 hours of work; that would be 363 words an hour, a pace most people can't sustain. For most translators, 2000 words is a hard day's work.

This is because translation is harder than just typing whatever comes into your head; in case you haven't understood this point, the idea is to take text that's already been written in another language, and express it in yours. And ideally, you have to express it well, as though it had already been written in your language to start with. Since you are doubtlessly monolingual, I will just note here that this is a hell of a lot harder than it sounds. I translate well over a million words a year, and I still sometimes come out with unbelievable Germanisms.

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