Human translation of public health documents took 17 hours to 6 days and up to 35 days end-to-end

Description #

Across 11 human-translation (HT) projects at a local health department, the manual (commercial-vendor) portion of translating a public health promotion document took anywhere from 17 hours (rush orders) to 6 days, averaging about 3 days. Counting the full end-to-end process — pretranslation preparation, vendor translation, and posttranslation quality assurance — a document took a minimum of 2 days and up to 35 days, with an average of 15 days (Table 2).

"As shown in Table 2, it took a minimum of 2 days, and up to 35 days, for a document to go through the entire translation process, with an average time of 15 days." (Turner, 2014, p. 526)

"The manual portion of the translation process, which was performed by commercial translation vendors contracted by the public health departments in this analysis, took anywhere from 17 hours (rush orders) to 6 days, with an average of about 3 days." (Turner, 2014, p. 527)

Methods Context #

What? #ⓘ

The observable: total elapsed time (in hours/days) to move a document through translation, with the process bounded from "ready for translation" to "ready for public release."

"The translation process was defined as beginning the moment an English language document was deemed ready for translation and ending when the translation was deemed ready for public release." (Turner, 2014, p. 525)

How? #ⓘ

A time-and-task workflow analysis: a spreadsheet built from prior workflow research listed the primary translation tasks with start/end points, and employees recorded start and end times, from which hours were computed on a 24-hour scale (weekends/holidays included) and grouped into phases.

"To estimate the time spent on HT at the health department, we created a spreadsheet on the basis of our prior research on translation workflow, listing the primary tasks involved in the translation process and defining their start and end points" (Turner, 2014, p. 525)

Who? #ⓘ

Eleven human-translation projects of public health promotion documents, tracked by employees across 3 different programs at Public Health–Seattle & King County over a 20-month period, spanning Spanish and multiple additional languages.

"Employees in 3 different programs tracked a total of 11 translation projects between February 2011 and October 2012." (Turner, 2014, p. 525)

Other Notes #

These elapsed-time figures reflect total time across all languages and include pretranslation and quality-assurance activities that would remain even if machine translation replaced the manual translation step. This EVD establishes the HT time baseline against which the MT-plus-postediting speed EVD is compared.