|
|
CAT Tools and Productivity: Tracking Words and Hours
Abstract
A freelance translator calculates her productivity
over a period of 18 months tracking number of words
translated, time devoted to translation and the CAT-tool
used for every project. It's been some time since CAT tools have been part
of my work routine. When I first started using DejaVu,
it was more a curiosity than a real need. At that
time CAT tools were a luxury; one had to invest some
money, but mainly the translator had to invest time
to learn them and to become accustomed with their
philosophy. Not everyone was willing to do so. Since
then things have changed dramatically. CAT tools are
a must today, and for a certain type of translation
jobs, there is no chance that you will be busy unless
you know how to use them. Moreover, you need to be
familiar with more than one commercial packageeach
client has his own preferencesand sometimes
you need to learn a custom-made tool developed by
a client for his own needs. For people like me, who started out in the translation
profession in the pre-CAT-tool era and now are regular
CAT-tool users, it is obvious that to some extent
the main argument of CAT tools developers is true:
these devices improve productivity. Yet I always had
the curiosity to measure this improvement in terms
of time and profit. Especially during the last few
years that translation agencies tend to demand considerable
price reductions when a translation is processed using
a CAT tool, it becomes more and more difficult to
understand whether or not the improvement in productivity
is canceled by price reductions. The time to answer this question for my personal
practice came when the volume of my work increased
to a degree that record-keeping became necessary to
track current and older jobs, invoices, clients, files
etc. I solved this problem developing my own record-keeping
program in Microsoft Access. The program allowed me
to keep track of jobs, dates, volumes of words and
hours, clients, location of files in my hard disk,
invoices, pending jobs and everything else that could
make my life easier. It also allowed me to prepare
simple statistics, calculating work volume (words
or hours or both) for a certain period of time or
for a certain client or clients. With the record-keeping
program I had a very easy way to calculate words of
my previous jobs in any desirable combination. The simpler way to track productivity with a CAT
tool would be to record volume of words translated
with this tool together with the time devoted to translation.
This would give one a measure of translation output
(words/hour). Although such a measurement would not
take into account a significant parameter, quality,
it could still provide a rough estimate of productivity. The record-keeping program offered the first precondition
necessary for checking CAT-tool-related productivity
in my practice. The second would be an easy way to
track time while I was translating. The solution to
this was the Activity Timer, a shareware program developed
by Robert Walker (http://www.tunesmithy.co.uk/).
Activity Timer tracks time in an impressively simple
way. The last bit was to include into my record-keeping
program the option to classify the words of a job
the way a CAT tool does (exact match, fuzzy match,
no match) and to record which CAT tool I was using
every time. With some work in Access, the record-keeping
program was able to calculate the time during which
I was working using a certain CAT tool and the words
that I translated during that time. The rest was based
in my commitment to bringing this task to an end.
Today, after 18 months of tracking, I think I know
a little more about how CAT tools affect my job, and
I would like to share this knowledge with you. In
the following paragraphs I will describe in some detail
the process of tracking, and I will give you the results
of this evaluation. CAT tools During the last 2 years, I've been using mainly three
CAT tools: DejaVu (latest version X), Trados (latest
version 6) and a custom made CAT tool developed by
one of my main clients. Thus, this study evaluated
these three tools. Translations were processed with
one of these tools using either translation memory
databases (memories) and terminology databases (terms)
provided by the clients or the memories and terms
that I had accumulated over the years from my previous
projects. I have such memories and terms for both
DejaVu and Trados containing approximately 150,000
entries each. Projects processed with the custom-made
CAT tool were coming with their own memories, when
they were available. Record-keeping program The program was developed based on Microsoft Access
and currently runs under Windows XP. A form is used
for data entry (Fig. 1) and the record is updated
whenever a new job arrives. From the various data
that are entered for a job, those related to CAT tool/productivity
study were: Fig.1: Data entry form of the Record-keeping
program. The fields that are used for the CAT tool
study are enclosed in blue rectangles. Activity Timer This shareware program, developed by Robert Walker
(http://www.tunesmithy.co.uk/),
tracks time. You can set multiple timers and select
an active one each time. One of the main advantages
of the program is that you can set a time limit after
which the timer stops if the computer is inactive;
this way you minimize the possibility that you will
accidentally let the timer running when you actually
are doing something else. The time limit was set at
1 min. For each translation job that I was tracking,
I was creating a new timer and was giving it the same
name that the job had in the record-keeping program
(copy/paste). After the end of the job, the total
time was transferred into the "total time"
field of the record-keeping program and the timer
was reset. Calculation of time and words per CAT tool
Calculations are performed per CAT tool. The combination
of a number of Access queries permits the calculation
of words and hours for the following cases: A form is used to initiate calculations for a particular
period of time (Fig. 2). Fig. 2: The form that initiates
CAT-tool related calculations The output is a table for each of the cases mentioned
above (Fig. 3). Fig. 3: Table with the results for
job processed with Trados for a reduced price. One
can see the number of jobs and the totals of "no
match" words, "fuzzy match" words,
"exact match" words, and translation time. To be considered for tracking, a job should fulfill
the following criteria: Results of CAT tool tracking from June 2003 to
December 2004 During this period I received 175 jobs, with a total
word count of 468,878 words, that fulfilled the tracking
criteria. CAT tools and translation times were successfully
tracked in 90 of these jobs with a total word count
of 359,105 words (76% of the total word load for this
period) and a total translation time of 544.85 hours.
The results per CAT tool were as following: CAT tool No of projects Total Word count Total time Trados 36 158940 192.8 DejaVu 25 42525 74.35 Custom
CAT tool 26 155023 271.2 No
CAT tool 3 2617 6.5 Although in the initial design of the study the option
of not using a CAT tool was included, at the end of
tracking there were only 3 projects in which no CAT
tool was used, with a total word count of 2617 words.
Because of the very low word count, this data was
considered statistically irrelevant for further processing. When results were analyzed based on requests for
price reduction, the findings were the following: CAT tool Price No of projects "no match" words "fuzzy match" words "exact match" words Total time Trados full 16 33708 0 0 79.4 Trados reduced 20 38624 14376 72232 113.4 There was only a single DejaVu job done at a reduced
price, with a total word count of 1500 words. Because
of the low word count, this job was considered not
suitable for further analysis. Jobs processed with
the custom-made CAT tool had a fixed rate and were
not considered in this analysis. Productivity calculation Productivity was defined as words translated per
hour and it was calculated per CAT tool: CAT tool Productivity (words/hour) Trados
(total word count) 824.3 Trados
(full price) 424.5 Trados
(reduced price) 1104.3 DejaVu 571.9 Custom
CAT tool 571.6 Productivity adjusted for price reduction
In order to compare productivity between the two
Trados groups (full- and reduced-price) an adjustment
was made in the word count of jobs done at a reduced
price in order to compensate the income loss caused
by the price reduction. The word count of each word
category (no match, fuzzy match, and exact match)
was multiplied by a factor that incorporated the average
percentage of price reduction for each category (1,
0.7 and 0.25, respectively). The word count and productivity
were then recalculated. CAT tool Price "no match" words x
1 "fuzzy match" words
x 0.7 "exact match" words
x 0.25 Adjusted word number Total time (hours) Adjusted productivity (words/hour) Trados reduced 38624
x 1 = 38624 14376
x 0.7 = 10063 72232
x 0.25 = 18058 66745
113.4 588.5 What do all these numbers mean? Fig. 4: Relative productivity per
CAT-tool. The productivity of each tool was compared
to the typical output of 250 words/hour which is considered
the baseline (relative productivity = 1). (trados
total= productivity for the total word count processed
with Trados; Trados adjusted=productivity for discounted
Trados projects after adjustment of word count to
compensate for the price reduction). The first conclusion from the analysis of these data
is that the use of any of the three CAT tools increases
productivity considerably. In all three cases productivity
was well above the standard average of 250 words/hour.
When relative productivity was calculated (defined
as the ratio of each individual productivity to the
standard output of 250 words/hour), the increase ranged
from x 1.6 up to x 4.4 (Figure 4). Impressive result for all three tools! I had this
feeling before I started the study, but seeing the
actual results makes any reservations disappear. Well, how much can one rely on the actual numbers
calculated in this study? It is important to remember
that these calculations concern my performance at
a very specific point of my career (after almost 10
years of freelance work), for a specific type of translation
(technical, focused mainly on automotive and medical
instrumentation), and for a specific language pair
(English into Greek). Moreover, the performance of
the CAT-tools is directly related to the content of
the actual translation memories used. Therefore, one
should be cautious in extrapolating from these data.
You can, however, consider them indicative. The typical
output of 250 words/hour isfor me at leasta
standard that describes well the average output without
the use of any kind of CAT tool. The comparison would
be much more relevant if I had succeeded to include
a considerable volume of words translated without
the use of a CAT tool. This was not the case, despite
my dedication to this study. I translated only 2617
words (0.7% of the tracked words) without a CAT tool.
What about each individual CAT tool? Although the
differences between the three tools are obvious, it
is not possible to draw general conclusions concerning
the performance of each of them. The actual productivity
in each case depends on the type of job and the memory
and terminology databases used, even for jobs processed
with the same CAT tool. The more specific the memory
databases, the larger the word volume you can translate
in the same time period. Moreover, each CAT tool may
have a different success rate in pulling up existing
translations from the translation memories. A detailed
evaluation of these parameters would be necessary
if one wanted to make comparisons between the tools. In this study I succeeded to track information concerning
matching between the text to be translated and the
memories only for a portion of the projects processed
with Trados. These projects were supported by specific
translation memories supplied by the clients and were
priced at a lower rate. There are some very interesting
conclusions coming from this group. First, the productivity
increase in this group was impressive, reaching almost
5-fold compared to the typical output, underscoring
the importance of specialized translation memories.
Second, even when the word count was adjusted to compensate
for the income loss due to lower rates, the productivity
was still almost twice as high as the baseline productivity.
My reluctance to translate without using a CAT tool
is by itself an interesting point of this study. At
the beginning, I tried to work without a CAT tool
for the shake of the study. However, shortly thereafter
I decided that this was not acceptable in my everyday
professional routine. This is due to at least two
reasons. First, the extra time necessary for translation
was annoying. Second and most important, in addition
to time savings, CAT tools offer invaluable help in
terminology and style consistency. This is something
that may be difficult to measure, but is obvious to
me, and to any other CAT tool user, I suppose. And
finally, since using a CAT tool lets you transfer
any project into a memory data base for future reference,
I always had the feeling that if I did not use a CAT
tool I would waste the chance of a future reference
for the same or another client. The option of alignment
exists for most CAT tools, of course, but it is time-consuming. Well, finally at the end of all this effort I confirmed
what I already knew empirically. CAT tools are well
integrated in my work routine, and they are here to
stay! They do speed up the translation process, and
they help me provide a better product to my clients.
Price reductions, when requested, are indeed annoying,
but if the reduction is within acceptable limits,
the productivity enhancement is not canceled by the
lower rate, and both the client and I are happy. One
may have his/her preferences (I have my own) as to
which CAT tool is better, but from this study I concluded
that all three tools that were tested performed very
well and increased my hourly output much above the
standard average. I still track my work time. After
all these months it comes naturally to turn the Activity
Timer on when a new project starts. After all, this
habit is not bad: it gives you a better picture of
how you allocate your work time...
E-mail this article to your colleague! Need more translation jobs? Click here! Translation agencies are welcome to register here - Free! Freelance translators are welcome to register here - Free! |
|
|
Legal Disclaimer Site Map |