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As a translator, you’re always aware that your income goes along with the word volume you can accomplish, which motivates you to find out how to translate faster while still can maintain the high quality in every translation. Thankfully, there are several ways that you can apply to increase your translation speed without scarifying your quality. Below are 5 tips on the subject to get you started.
Read more: A Helpful Guide on Translation Skill: What You Need to Raise The Bar?
One of the most important ways to improve your translation speed is to type properly. You may find this information quite trivial to become a tip for enhancing your working speed. However, are you one hundred percent sure that you are proficient in typing without glancing at the keyboard? If the answer is not completely, now is the time to learn. Many great programs are available out there to help you quickly master the keyboard. By practicing, you soon will be typing at lightning speed before you realize it.
If you are a freelance translator, a workplace could be anywhere you want. However, it is essential to have a place with minimal interruptions. Distractions could easily drag you out of the translation flow, making your work volume of that day drop to an unwanted level. You could work at your house, the coffee shop, a co-working place, etc. wherever your preference, as long as it’s a place that you can find peaceful and easy to focus on so you can centralize your effort to accelerate your work.
Things will be quite different for in-house translators as they have to spend around eight hours at the office. If you’re in the same situation, the office environment might be already quiet for you to concentrate. So you can boost this state by arranging your desk in a way that makes you feel energized the most. Whatever your preference, ensure that your surrounding is designed in such a way as to maximize your productivity levels.
Sometimes a small incentive for yourself may boost your speed better than attempting to type as fast as possible. It could be a chocolate bar, your favorite snack, or drink at the end of each hour or when you reach a specific volume. The treats will motivate you to work harder and faster to achieve it. Vary your incentives to keep up your enthusiasm.
Translation nowadays is not merely human linguists working with documents but also relying a lot on technology. For example, with translation memories, you can effortlessly analyze your old translations and apply equivalent terms and phrases for similar projects. You can save a huge amount of time from this and can put your effort into other critical problems. Spell and grammar checkers are also significant help for you to polish your output without putting in too much effort and time.
One final pointer to help you not only answer the question of how to translate faster but also improve your quality is to become experts in one or two specific areas. The ability to handle diverse topics may help you get a lot of projects but also require you to do plenty of research which might take a lot of time. This will help you gather general knowledge in each field to translate its simple contents. However, when it comes to more complex documents, your clients will partner with the subject-matter experts and will pay more for it. Therefore, picking out an area where you feel motivated and happy while translating to focus on is essential. And of course, being specialized in a field also speed you up since you are already familiar with the subject every day.
You may now find the proper answers to the question of how to translate faster. By applying these tips, we hope that you can both increase your profitability and translation quality. If you think there are more effective ways to boost translation productivity, please share them in the comment section!
