I know this is a perennial topic here on Skritter but since there was a recent blog post regarding translation I thought I would bring it up again.

The following excerpt from said post really intrigued me:

"Every article is going to have its own unique challenges, but first starting out it could take anywhere from 6-10 hours for Julien to translate a single article, but now it's anywhere from 3-6 hours on average."

Three to ten hours is a significant amount of time to spend working on one article: for me, that's equivalent to about one working day. It's also not that much slower than professional translators.

Philip Gabriel, a translator of Haruki Murakami, himself can only manage four pages a day, twenty pages a week, eighty pages a month; this indicates that even world-class translators aren't orders of magnitude faster than the rest of us.

This got me thinking: is it necessary to cut your teeth with articles before attempting books or other longer works of literature? Are the skill sets similar?

Translating texts, articles, essays, books,... is really hard and time consuming. At least if you want to do a proper job. 10 pages a day is really the maximum I can achieve, if the original text is not too difficult and the end result doesn't need to be too polished. 4 to 5 pages a day seems very realistic to me if you want to produce a good text.

translating a manual or a piece of literature is not the same.

it can take time to find the suitable expression/ sentence.

We're doing newspaper articles in class and I take about 4 hours for one A4 page of Japanese right now.
The articles are about politics and economics and I guess it would be faster with an easier topic, because I admit I have to look up quite some vocabulary and kanji... but basically I still think it's fun and it's one of the things that helped improve my japanese best ^^

Translating into Japanese is of course a whole lot different thing and I have yet to have translated a whole sentence complletely right, because I get at least one piece of vocabulary wrong, because there are so many tricky meanings to some vocab, like certain words are only meant to be used in a positive or negative context.

I haven't attempted to translate books yet, but I guess it really depends on the piece, because of the words used. Articles are (or should be) neutral, while you have to convey emotions in a book, which could be more tricky.