Do you know what one of the translator’s most difficult tasks is? Think about your exams at school or in college. What was the most stressful thing in each exam? You got it? Indeed, time management is one of the most stressful elements not only during your exams, but also in your professional life, and unfortunately, translators are not immune to this either. But don’t worry, this article is here to give you tips to help you manage your time to organise a project as a translator. If you want to know more about the meeting of deadlines or how to gain time with computer tools, I encourage you to read the other articles in the same section.
One important step is to schedule your day, and even your week. As a translator, you will have many projects and tasks to manage, that’s why it’s important, before starting your work, to create task lists and to divide one task into several units. I advise you to prioritise the tasks that stress you the most so that it will be done, and you won’t need to keep that stress in the back of your mind (for more details about this, I encourage you to read the article How to be efficient and never miss deadlines). Another method is to create translation memories and glossaries per subject to organise your translations.
Then, after having organised your tasks, think of organising your time. At the beginning, you will surely be full of energy, wanting to translate as many documents and projects as possible. But you know, we all have our limits, so think about taking small breaks during the day. One tip that I can give you is to make use of idle time, when a document is downloading for example. You can use this time to do something else, instead of just waiting or it can be considered as a small break. That makes me think about something else: don’t forget to distribute your time. By this, I mean assigning a specific activity (including the breaks) to each hour. If you’re a freelance translator, it’s also important to set time limits. As if you were working in an agency, you have to make the difference between professional and private life. But never forget to spare some time to check your translations!
Let’s talk about your working environment. Maybe you haven’t thought about this, but depending on the environment you’re working in, you can gain time. First, reduce external distractions and set a specific time of the day to do something else (like chatting with your friends or drinking a cup of coffee). It’s not forbidden, but if you don’t want these secondary activities to be too intrusive, it’s very important to stick to your schedule. If you don’t trust yourself and you know you will be tempted to check if your best friend has answered your message, I advise you to install programs to block certain websites or applications during certain periods.
Another tool which can help you manage your time can be a time-tracking tool. Personally, I don’t use that but I think it might be useful for some of you, that’s why I have searched the best time-tracking tools for you, and I found out that the best one was Toggl Track, but there are also Clockify, TimeCamp, Paymo and many others that you can easily find on the Internet. These tools are pretty easy to use, they are usually free (at least Toggl Track), and generate detailed reports for different periods. It’s a very interesting tool for a professional translator, because it allows you to set up a specific project for each of the different activities you do during the day, including your breaks, so that you can track how much downtime you have. You may ask, why is it so important? Well, I can give you two main reasons. The first one is that you can discover whether you’re using your time, efficiently or not, especially for activities that generate income. You can also see how long you take for each specific translation activity. In short, it helps you make yourself more efficient and more competitive. The second reason is that you have you can directly show your clients the time you need to do a translation. It’s especially useful for a project charged by the hour, so that the client can see if the time you’re spending on these activities is reasonable and fair.
If after taking my advice, you still don’t make it in time, I think you overestimated yourself. In order to know what you are able to translate, you have to know the number of words you can translate per hour. Take into account the fact that at the beginning of your career, you will need more time because you don’t have a lot of experience and you still have many terms to learn. But after having translated hundreds of documents in the same field, you will know the terminology by heart. But at the beginning, you can’t know what you are able to do if you haven’t calculated it. They are very simple tools made available by Microsoft Office, but also in OpenOffice and LibreOffice, in Google Drive and even for PDF files! Word count is really important, because it’s a great tool to help determine the amount of time it takes to deliver a translation, but also because it can affect how much you pay for translation software, and how much a client will pay you.
My last piece of advice is not only valuable for translation, but for everything you will undertake in your life. Know your limits and accept them. Be aware of what you can do depending on your experience. Deal with your skills in order to develop them gradually and learn from those around you. It will make you aware of how efficient you are and avoid frustration.
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