Off topic: What was your annual job wordcount for 2021? Thread poster: Adieu
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Adieu 
Ukrainian to English
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Mine was ~1.3 million, slow start then 1 million words June - December w/ full workload.
| | | | Mihai Badea (X)
Luxembourg
Local time: 14:17
English to Romanian
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| That seems crazy | Feb 9, 2022 |
One million words in six months is a huge volume.
Would you be able to provide more details on what types of documents you translated? And how did you manage to achieve this kind of productivity?
In terms of quality, are you happy?
I assume there were no substantial complaints.
***
Is this a poll? Are we supposed to answer with specific figures?
None (mostly).
| | | | Adieu
Ukrainian to English
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TOPIC STARTER | It's not that much | Feb 9, 2022 |
Look at market rates and remember those pesky "weighted" CAT discounts, how else can you make any kind of decent money?
The 1.3m figure is a guesstimate, old computer died on me. My new laptop bought last summer shows a current total of just over 1 million words in memoQ, so the 1 million in half a year part is correct.
It's also about half revision, albeit sprinkled with a lot of single-page documents for $50 minimums helping to raise effective rates.
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 14:17
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Most jobs that I do, end up in temporary TMs, so on the one hand I can just do a word count on all my TMs of all TUs that have my user ID and a date in 2021 (and remove duplicates, since I often re-use even temporary TMs). But 70-80% of my work is revision, not translation, so this means I'd have to estimate how many words were revision and how many translation. With these caveats in mind, I did the count, and got: 1 million words revision, 350 000 words translation.
However, not... See more Most jobs that I do, end up in temporary TMs, so on the one hand I can just do a word count on all my TMs of all TUs that have my user ID and a date in 2021 (and remove duplicates, since I often re-use even temporary TMs). But 70-80% of my work is revision, not translation, so this means I'd have to estimate how many words were revision and how many translation. With these caveats in mind, I did the count, and got: 1 million words revision, 350 000 words translation.
However, not all work that I do, end up in TMs. For example, an LQA task of 3000 words may take 2 hours for the revision (which end up in a temporary TM), but then I still need to fill in the LQA report, which is another 30 minutes. Or, a translation task of 1000 words in an online CAT tool may take 2 hours for the translation (which end up in a temporary TM), but I spend 30-60 minutes extracting, pre-processing, post-processing and pasting the text. ▲ Collapse
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| Words and words | Feb 9, 2022 |
To use a truly hideous term beloved of my least beloved client (it’s been an ongoing love/hate thing for 20-odd years), how many of those were “effort words”?
I don’t do CAT discounts but I do do (do, da da da) a lot of monolingual work, so I can only really extrapolate from earnings. I’d say about 300,000 word-equivalents.
| | | | Jan Truper
Germany
Local time: 14:17
Member (2016)
English to German
guesstimate, fuzzy-adjusted, translation only
| | | | Kay Denney
France
Local time: 14:17
French to English
I suppose I could add up the number of words in my ledger for 2021... but I don't have the total number of words for the agencies who like me to put all jobs for the month in a single bill. I could find the total on each bill I suppose but that's starting to sound like too much work.
I was wondering how people find this information easily and I see that your CAT tool tells you. I rarely use CAT tools, and I have no idea how to find the info in the two CAT tools I do use...
| | | | | Weighted word count | Feb 9, 2022 |
1.3M seems huge, unless you're talking "total word count". "Weighted word count" is more relevant if you want to get a clear overview of the work you've done, IMO.
In 2021, I translated ~401000 words (WWC) and post-edited ~47000 words, working part-time during the second semester. I don't do review/proofreading, so these figures reflect quite well the amount of work I have done in 2021.
In 2020, when I worked full time, I translated ~480000 words and post-edited ~163000 words.
Kay Denney wrote:
I was wondering how people find this information easily and I see that your CAT tool tells you. I rarely use CAT tools, and I have no idea how to find the info in the two CAT tools I do use...
I add every single job I take on in an Excel file with all the relevant details (job n°, invoice n°, client name, wordcount, deadline, etc.). This way, I know exactly how many words I have translated, for which clients, etc.
[Edited at 2022-02-09 13:24 GMT]
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| More or less 900.000 in the whole 2021 | Feb 9, 2022 |
I say more or less because I divided the total euros for my usual word rate (average),
| | | | Adieu
Ukrainian to English
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TOPIC STARTER | In memoQ it's easy | Feb 9, 2022 |
Set your project list to show all, sort by date, shift-select the desired items (single click to highlight first (or last), then hold shift and click the opposite end), and look at the bottom line (no pun intended, the info is literally across the bottom of the memoQ window)
Kay Denney wrote:
I suppose I could add up the number of words in my ledger for 2021... but I don't have the total number of words for the agencies who like me to put all jobs for the month in a single bill. I could find the total on each bill I suppose but that's starting to sound like too much work.
I was wondering how people find this information easily and I see that your CAT tool tells you. I rarely use CAT tools, and I have no idea how to find the info in the two CAT tools I do use...
[Edited at 2022-02-09 14:24 GMT]
[Edited at 2022-02-09 14:25 GMT]
| | | | | What's the point | Feb 9, 2022 |
of counting words, whatever that means. I calculate only earnings, which is all that matters. Too many various types of work, clients, etc. Financial accounting and making sure everybody pays in time is already enough time-consuming. Also, all words are equal but some words are "more equal that others" (timewise, moneywise, etc.).
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 14:17
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Kay Denney wrote:
I was wondering how people find this information easily and I see that your CAT tool tells you. I rarely use CAT tools, and I have no idea how to find the info in the two CAT tools I do use...
I use WFC, so all TMs are plaintext files. I do a file search through all of my jobs folders for text files that contain a certain word that I know only occurs in the TM's header, and then I use a bit of command-line trickery to merge all those text files together into a single text file. Then I open it in Excel (since WFC's TM is a tab-delimited file), sort in various ways to trim it down to only the relevant segments, reduce it to just the date and the source text, remove all duplicate lines, and then count just the source text column.
Adieu wrote:
[In MemoQ,] set your project list to show all, sort by date, shift-select the desired items (single click to highlight first (or last), then hold shift and click the opposite end), and look at the bottom line (no pun intended, the info is literally across the bottom of the memoQ window).
This only works if you keep all your MemoQ projects in the list. When I use MemoQ, I regularly remove them, to keep the dashboard tidy. Unfortunately MemoQ's file list does not have an archive folder, so I use the Recycle Bin as the archive folder.
In addition, this trick only works if you receive all jobs entirely untranslated, and then translate all the text yourself. I currently have 5 projects in the list, total word count 25000, but fewer than 3000 of those words were reviewed/translated by me. The rest are from files that are present in the projects, but that the client had left there for whatever reason (reference purposes?).
[Edited at 2022-02-09 15:40 GMT]
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Adieu
Ukrainian to English
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TOPIC STARTER | To get a sense of what and how other people are doing | Feb 9, 2022 |
Due to the nature of this industry, exactly no one will tell you outright "I work for Vasya Pupkin & Co., Ltd., charge N$ per word, and make $Mk anually" (unless they also double as head of recruiting at Vasya and could care less if 10,000 hungry translators apply tomorrow to offer to work for N-0.01)
Evgeny Sidorenko wrote:
of counting words, whatever that means. I calculate only earnings, which is all that matters. Too many various types of work, clients, etc. Financial accounting and making sure everybody pays in time is already enough time-consuming. Also, all words are equal but some words are "more equal that others" (timewise, moneywise, etc.).
| | | | Arianne Farah
Canada
Local time: 08:17
Member (2008)
English to French
| About a million give or take | Feb 9, 2022 |
I don't keep an exact count, but I take my income, divide by my per-word rate and figure that's what I translated (or reviewed, I estimate 1 translated word = 3 reviewed words)
It sounds like a lot, but if you break it down it's in the 3500 words per business day range, factoring a couple of minimum charges a day (projects that pay an hour but are only a few words) and a rush surcharge or two a month.
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