Probably every freelance translator is familiar with the situation when you work for two days, pausing only to make another cup of coffee. Are there any norms that control the length of the working day and the number of pages a specialist has to translate for a certain period of time?
None
Unfortunately or fortunately, there are no stringent standards, everything depends on the subject of the translation and the translator’s professionalism. The Union of Translators recommends to take as a guide 6-7 standard (reference) pages a day assuming 1,800 characters with spaces or 1,600 without spaces. According to the European Union standards, a translator has to manage 2,000 words. Generally speaking, the optimal speed at which most experienced translators work is about one and a half accounting pages per hour.
In any case, if you set a goal and arm yourself with a translation memory program, you can translate more than 30 reference pages per day. But even assuming that the translator is very familiar with the subject and the terminology, this huge volume is unlikely to be completed without loss of quality. However, the freelance translation market is teeming with “you need to translate 40,000 characters by midnight. Strange as it may seem, there are performers for such jobs too.
However, it is obvious that the speed of translation and the duration of the working day are individual for everyone, and understanding how much a person is able to translate and in what time comes exclusively with experience, with which the productivity of the work grows as well.
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