How can a new writer make a realistic estimate of his work rate?
This question relates to my earlier question Habits and routines for my first tech writing job which I was told to split into two parts.
My first technical writing / translation gig starts soon. A Japanese company has offered me a gig helping translate an Android business application + documentation into English. Their staff will do a rough translation, and I will polish it into something reasonably professional.
The client has a clear idea of how long the job will take me, and wants me to spend a fixed number of hours working in their office. I have no way of knowing whether the client’s estimate is realistic.
I need to start making my own estimates as early as possible but, if my computer programming experience is anything to go by, I’m the worst person to do that. If you ask a novice programmer, “How long will it take you to do Job A?” he answers, “A day.” If you break Job A down into sub-jobs and ask, “How long to do A1, A2, ... A10?” he answers, “A week.” If you hold him to that, he burns out in a month.
How do I estimate how long the job will take? How do I avoid the trap of overpromising out of an abundance of enthusiasm and a desire to please the client?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/5213. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Estimates of how long work like this will take are always guesswork. One can make some excellent guesses when one is experienced, but even then, it's advisable for one to take several factors into account:
The difficulty of the material. Have you seen any of the text you'll be translating? If you have, then you already have a rough guide as to how long this will take.
I suggest actually doing the cleanup work you'll be doing on a few pages of the material while timing yourself. You can then make an estimate of how much time the core project will take. This is an amazingly simple and useful technique that I do with every editing or rewrite job before quoting a fee or setting any timelines, to avoid surprises for myself or for the client.
While this is much simpler with straight text (where you will have a word or page count), I imagine similar techniques can be used with translating an app.
(Perhaps another tech writer can chime in about this. How do you estimate the volume of application text? Is there a metric here that's useful?)Communication issues can also add time to a project. In this case, I'm guessing the documentation team will be in the office where you'll be doing the work?
If you come across problems while doing the rewrite that are prohibiting you from proceeding, timely responses to questions from your client will make your job easier. If your only contact is in Japan, you'll have to wait overnight for responses.Familiarity with the material is also something that can add time to a project. In this case, you have a technical background, but are you familiar with Android's quirks? If not, add a little time to your estimate.
If, after getting a time estimate together, you find that the client's timeline is truly unrealistic, I recommend going to them with this information and discussing the issue. If the two of you truly are at odds here, then this could easily turn into a difficult working situation that it'd be best to avoid. On the other hand, if your estimate is fairly close to what they're looking for, then you have no problems.
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