Words received and delivered
From January 2011 to March 2014, our volunteer translators delivered over 16.2 million words to humanitarian organizations. This is more than 20 times the total of words in the King James Bible.
During the last 12 months we delivered 7,550,275 translated words to humanitarian organizations, equivalent to 329,000 words per month.
A total of 7,031,425 words were delivered during the year 2013. This represents a 56% increase with respect to the words delivered during 2012, and it is 2.8 times the total delivered during the year 2011.
Translators
The team of professionals approved by Translators without Borders reached 2320 by the end of March. This number is enough to cope with demand in several language pairs, such as English into Spanish, but this is not enough to provide appropriate coverage in other pairs.
An example is English into French (our most demanded pair) where we have 280 volunteers, but only 220 of them have accepted words for translation so far. Several jobs in that language pair were recently cancelled because no volunteers accepted them. We also need more help into languages of India and Africa.
In case you know any translator you consider to be a good professional and who would be willing to become a Translator without Borders, please let me know via email at twb (at) proz (dot) com.
Our top volunteer translator is Eric Ragu, who has donated an amazing 262K words. Next comes Ashutosh Mitra, who has donated 224K words, an enormous amount for the English into Hindi pair. Then we find ishaklamia (217,000 words), and Edgard Inc. (163,000 words, translated by a team).
Three volunteers have donated more than 200,000 words each, and 13 translators have donated more than 100,000 words each.
If you represent a client NGO making use of our services, please remember to thank translators who helped you and be quick to share with them any positive feedback received. Please be sure to acknowledge their work wherever possible and be ready to answer their queries, as your replies will help ensure better translation quality.
Language pairs
During the last 12 months our translators accepted volunteer assignments in 104 language pairs. Top language pair was English to French, representing 23.4% of the operation, followed by English into Spanish (15.0%), French into English (12.8%), Spanish into English (4.4%) and English into Portuguese (4.1%).
Overall, the top three pairs represented 51.20% of the words posted for translation in the last 12 months, a slowly growing trend as compared with the values of 48% and 47.3% reported in July and February respectively.
English into Spanish keeps growing faster (from 9.4% to 15.0% and replaced French into English in the second position). This is welcome, as this is the pair with the most volunteers. English into Portuguese replaced English into Arabic as the fifth pair in the operation.
We are particularly happy to have added the Native American languages Guarani, Quechua and K’iche’ as part of the Wikipedia project, and because of our contributions in the latter, a Wikipedia incubator was created in K’iche’.
Clients
A record 139 humanitarian organizations requested our services during the last 12 months, a 39% increase with respect to the number reported in our last newsletter.
Top clients during that period were the Wikipedia project (1.7 Million words delivered), followed by Médicos sin Fronteras from Spain (840,000 words), Médecins Sans Frontières from Switzerland (560,000 words), and then Acción contra el Hambre, Spain and Action contre la Faim, two branches of the same humanitarian organization (292,000 words and 232,000 words respectively).
