What Do Translators Dream About?

In a professional translator’s ideal world, we can reasonably surmise they might sometimes dream about:

1) A world where translation clients and professional translators collaborate to a greater extent in the process of producing translation deliverables that meet clients’ expectations and needs. While translation clients aren’t translators, they can often provide translators with a glossary of preferred terminology, or descriptive information about target audiences, and any other insights that give translators input on the discretionary aspects of the translation process.

2) Never having Google Translate used as a metric for evaluating the quality of their work. It seems like an obvious thing to say (a machine cannot effectively evaluate human performance in a process that involves subjective judgment). Yet translation companies do receive questions about translation projects when translations do not correlate with the output of Google Translate.

3) Translation project schedules that allow sufficient time for ensuring quality work. Professional translators typically process in the range of 2500-3000 words per day. At our company a second translator then reviews the first translator’s work. This process routinely results in high quality translation outputs. When project schedules must be accelerated it’s usually better to add personnel to projects rather than have translators extend their capacity too much beyond normal translation processing rates.