How about translating 10,000 words per day? Let’s boost your productivity!

Everybody wants to have more: more life, more free-time, more possibilities. Most people don’t get more, but what about those who do? Their days have 24 hours and they’re human, like the rest of us.

They’re not working more. They’re not necessarily working harder. So what is it that they’re doing that makes such a huge difference?

Whenever you hear about somebody doing something incredible, the achievement probably resulted from a highly developed complex skill – no magic was involved. In order to attain the same aptitude you need to ‘go old school’. Break the task into as many different steps as you can imagine, learn, practice and optimize.

How to do it exactly?
Here are four important steps:

• Reading the source material
• Researching
• Translating content = formulating the content in another language
• Typing

Now we have to split these steps up into sub-steps, which then need to be practiced as accurately as possible.

Reading
Everybody knows how to read, but the majority can’t retain information after reading quickly. Speedreading is a very desirable skill, and can be trained. By learning this skill you will be able to absorb visual information more efficiently, which in turn will make your translations more fluent with a lot less effort.

Research
We recommend that translators stick to a few subject areas in which they are interested and feel passionate about. The more you know about your subject area the easier the translation process is going to be and the less research you will need to do.

Translating
Translating can also be trained by practice. Every translation project is like an equation which needs to be solved. If you consciously work on the linguistic solutions needed and practice them, you won’t need to think as much or as hard as you might do now. Get in touch if you want to learn more.

Typing
Typing can be optimized as well. Just ask a piano virtuoso about how to move your fingers with rapid dexterity and they will teach you about the economy of movement: move your fingers as little as possible, don’t lift your hands from the keyboard, know where each key is without looking and perceive every millimeter. Done this way you’re going to make less mistakes and your typing will become effortless – and a lot faster.

This was just a short teaser for the program “How about translating 10,000 words per day?”. If you would like to know more, visit www.verbalathletes.com.

Author: Wolfgang Steinhauer, Translator & efficiency coach