Naked Translations had an interesting post a while back about advice to translation students and one of the comments got me thinking about translators and typing speeds. This recalled something that Douglas Robinson pointed out in his book Becoming a Translator, where he wisely states that, while “speed and income are not directly related for all translators[,] they are for freelancers” (28-9). Robinson lists several factors that affect a translator’s speed, but the first is typing speed. Which raises a good question. How fast do you type?
So I asked a few translator friends how fast they type. And you know what? My translator friends all type FAST. According to Wikipedia an average professional typist types 50 to 70 wpm. One of my translator buddies once set an enormous multinational temp agency’s typing test record with a score well over 100 wpm. Sure, 3 translator friends isn’t really a scientifically valid sample size, but it really got me thinking. So I did a little Web surfing (while procrastinating, of course—'tis the week of boring jobs, here).
There are lots of ways and places to test your typing speed. I rather enjoyed this one. It was pleasantly addictive. My best time today was 84 words per minute. What about you? Do you agree that typing speed is important for a freelance translator? Any advice on how I can speed my typing up even more?
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Hi MT,
What a great post. The last test I took (six years ago) had me typing about 90 wpm. You are absolutely correct. Most of the translators I know are fast typists too. I always say one of the most valuable classes I ever took in high school was Typing. It's not only my lifeblood now, but it also provided me with a good side income as a temp when I was in grad school.
Typing fast is important, but typing accurately is even more important. I played the piano as a kid, which helped strengthen my fingers, and learned on a manual typewriter :-)
Using voice recognition software is one way to write faster (usually 3x as fast as typing). However, you have to check very carefully every sentence you write, because the software does not make any typo, it replaces one word with another existing word. Of course the spellchecker cannot identify these mistakes...
And you can't use this kind of software for every type of text, e.g. technical text with a lot of numbers or abbreviations.
Keeping that in mind, I am sometimes able to double my daily production!
Well, I hunt and peck. I use two fingers and the occasional ring finger or pinky for shift. For the longest time I thought it was a huge disadvantage, so I checked with Mavis Beacon and she tried to teach me typing. I got pretty good in the first sections but then all of a sudden after a couple of weeks of training every day I started to get RSI and not just a little. Turns out, I am prone to RSI and the only thing that kept me from getting it was my hunt and peck method - simply because it is not as repetitive since my hands move around a lot more.
I did the test and I got 43 wpm and made 2 mistakes.
English is not my native language so that's strike #1 against me.
Strike #2 is that hunt and peck requires me to look at the keyboard - if I type "free", I am much faster. I tried that on the page you linked and if I type some random text I get to 63 wpm - not bad for hunt and peck!
Other than that, I am not sure in how far the actual typing speed factors in when you use CAT because it seems to me that the application commands interrupt the flow quite a bit.
With all due respect to Susanne :) I'm blown away whenever I meet freelancers who can't touch-type. I think that typing speed is a huge factor in how much you make per hour; if I couldn't touch-type (I got 84 wpm on the test you linked to; it was fun!!) I would definitely look into speech recognition software. Like Jill, I have to say that typing was one of my most valuable high school classes!
> I'm blown away whenever I meet freelancers
> who can't touch-type. I think that typing speed
> is a huge factor in how much you make per hour
In fact it is not. Think about it a minute and do some math. If you hunt and peck 20 wpm, in an hour you'll still do about 20 x 60 = 1200 wph. How many of us translate 1200 words per hour on a regular basis? The real bottlenecks involve thinking and research; typing speed is not a factor. Since my high school days I've been told by many people how "important" it is to learn to touch type, yet in the real world I have never noticed that I produce reports or other documents any slower than my colleagues who have that skill. My slow typing speed probably also means that I work more accurately and formulate the text better than I would typing 100 wpm.
Hi Kevin,
The typical full-time translator will type somewhere around 500,000 words per year. Other considerations being equal (research, thinking, accuracy, etc.), it will take a 20 wpm typist many, many more hours to reach that volume than an 80 wpm typist. There's just no way around that.
I doubt typing speed correlates much to accuracy for experienced typists. After all, the routine secretarial pools that were common until about 1980 were full of mainly women typists going at unimaginable speeds and with great accuracy. Nowadays we have AutoCorrect and AutoText and spell checks to help us now, too.
Being a slow deliberate typist is not bad, however. Obviously being thoughtful and careful are important to the profession. However, if slower typists could find a way to speed up their typing, they would be making much more efficient use of their time every day--more time to golf, run, garden...or blog!
-MT
No, MT, I would encourage you once again to do the math. Take your hourly average throughput and calculate it as wpm and you'll find that it is quite low for a typing speed. I am a very slow hunt and peck typist, but I doubt that there are really big differences in our translation speeds when other factors (subject familiarity, etc.) are considered. I work together with a very fast typist who has spent enough time in secretarial roles in the past banging away at 100 wpm or possibly higher, and there really is no appreciable difference in our translation speeds unless one of us has been awake all night reading.
If you do a properly controlled study of typing speed versus translation speed and find any statistically significant correlation, I'll eat a pound of liver (a truly disgusting thought).
Well, I myself like liver quite a bit, but I dare say you do owe me the eating of some!
-MT
Well, I tried the little test that you linked to MT: hunting and pecking at 32 wpm with no mistakes. Rather slow, but if I translated at my typing speed I would be doing 1800+ wph. No way that will ever happen. I think I do around 500-600 wph on an average text, maybe 1000-1200 wph tops on something really easy if I push myself. The real bottlenecks here are time to think and research, not typing time.
You beat me to, it, MT! I had a post on exactly that saved in my draft folder, inspired by a former co-worker whom I have actually seen type 120 words a minute in a test with 99% accuracy. Wow!
I completely agree that speed is definitely an important factor in productivity/earnings for me. I have certainly gotten much faster while working as an in-house, high-pressure translator for more than five years. For some reason, I use eight fingers, and on my last test, I was in the high 80s. I must take this test, too!
in fact I'm pretty good, this because I work as employer in a Internet rent service, so I spent al lthe day in typing dates, numbers, amounts and all sort of things.
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