How long does it take to translate a book?

How long it takes to translate a book depends on two separate clocks: the time it takes to translate the text, and the time it takes you to decide and to check. The second is almost always longer than the first. That is why the same question gets answers ranging from a day to six months, and both are true.

It is worth separating them before you set a publication date.

Why the question gets two very different answers

A human translator works at a pace. There is a number of words they can translate in a day without losing quality, and it does not vary much. A whole book is therefore a project of weeks to months, and its schedule follows from the length of the book and from their queue.

Machine translation works differently: it is not limited by working hours. To see what that means in practice, Amazon states on the help page for its translation service that creating a translation takes from a few hours up to a day, and that it can take up to three days for the translation to appear in the store.

Notice what happened there: the translation itself took hours, and showing up in the store took three times as long. That is exactly the pattern.

What sets the clock with a human translator

Four things, in order of impact:

• Their queue. A good translator is busy, and waiting for them to be free can take longer than the work itself.
• The length of the book. Linear, and without surprises.
• The type of text. Prose rich in dialogue moves more slowly than straightforward non-fiction.
• Rounds of corrections. Each round is at least a week, mostly because of response times on both sides.

The only item on that list under your control is the last one. How many rounds there will be is decided almost entirely by how clear the brief was at the start — we went into that in telling a translator how the book should sound.

What sets the clock when the translation is automated

Here the translating stage stops being the bottleneck, and three other things take its place.

The first is the file you uploaded. A tidy file goes through smoothly; a scanned file, a file with double-page spreads, or a file whose layout was built by hand creates cleanup work that takes time. We covered this in which file to send for translation.

The second is checking. A translation nobody has looked at is not a finished book, and that stays true even when the result is good. Some checks work without knowing the language, and we wrote about them in how to check a translation in a language you cannot read.

The third is the store. Even after everything is ready, approval and appearing on the page take their own time, and nobody speeds that up.

The part nobody puts a price on

This is the part that surprises authors: once the translation is ready, the book is not.

You have to decide what the book will be called in the new language, and rewrite the marketing text on the back — two things that are not translated literally, as we explained in the title and blurb get rewritten, not translated. You have to decide whether the cover stays. You have to pick categories and search terms in a language you may not read.

Each is a small decision, and together they can stall a book for two months. Not because they are hard, but because nobody put a date on them.

How to genuinely shorten it

Three things shorten the schedule more than any rush job:

Prepare a clean file before you start. An hour of tidying saves a whole round.

Prepare a short list of names and terms that must stay consistent — characters, places, terms unique to the book. That prevents exactly the problem we described in why the heroine's name changes halfway through.

And set yourself dates for the stages after the translation, not only for the translation. If you are building a first schedule, frequently asked questions puts the order straight.