Being a translator is comparatively a free and flexible profession. Every translation contributes to the increase of your income. With the translation teams increase yearly, some translators perform well in the completion, while others are still struggling.

Besides quality, efficiency is another factor that affects your competiveness and finally determines your income. Here I summarize some ways to improve the translation efficiency.

1. Improve your language proficiency. No matter in the source language or the target language. This is the fundamental requirement for a translator. The proficiency in the source language helps better understanding of the content being translated, while the proficiency in the target language allows you to use more natural and appropriate wordings to express the intent of the document which makes the translation sound good to the target audience. Keep on studying the language to constantly improve the language proficiency is an essential task for every translator.

2. Do something you are specialized in. If you are specialized in one field, you can spend less time to choose the target words you are going to use in the translation. The client will be happy to see that you understand their products or services and delivery the exact message they desire to convey to their audiences by using the accurate words or jargon in your translation. Try to focus on one specific field and dive into it, you can not only improve the efficiency, but also guarantee the quality of your translation.

3. Warming-up exercises beforehand. Before you start the translation, take some time to skip reading the source text to get a general idea of what you are going to translate. By doing this, you can determine the language style which is most appropriate for the upcoming translation. When you are not familiar with the subject, you can consult the reference materials beforehand to get some background knowledge which may help you better understand the context and save time during the course of translation.

4. Expand your knowledge in your daily life. Keep your eye on the things or happenings around you. In this information era, the information updates rapidly. Be aware of the new things which might one day be helpful for your translation.

5. Make good use of translation tools. Most of the translators are using trados during translation which helps time saving and improve the speed of translation. These kinds of tools are very powerful in functions. It not only helps save the sentences you translated before in the translation memory where the translation for the same or similar sentences come out in your next job. It saves time for you to translate the same or similar content again and keeps the consistency in the same project.Tools like SDLX may help you save time in modifying the repetitions in the document.When you modify a segment, the repeated segments will be modified automatically so that time will not be wasted in doing it one after another. Get familiar with the translation tools and make good use of them will surely help you improve your translation speed.

Above are the ways I summarized during my experience in translation. I believe others may have their experience shared on this topic. Let’s do some brainstorming and make progress together.

Read Also: Warming Up Before Translation