A professional translator will typically translate between 1500 and 2000 words (5 to 7 pages) a day. If the translator has to, and is familiar with the topic, they can translate up to 4000 words a day, for a very short period of time.

Significant progress has been made in the field of translations made by computers, but the result is a far cry from the natural language a human translator would produce. Read here about a rather extreme example of foolish reliance on a machine translation tool available on-line.

Computer-Assisted Translation software is used by professional translators to help them in their work. CAT products range from spelling and grammar checkers to term managers and translation memory programs. None of these programs can replace the human translator, they only simplify their work to some extent. For instance, a terminology tool may indicate a certain term as the preferred translation for a specific term in the source language, thus ensuring consistency in the use of terms. Translation memory programs store previously translated source texts and their equivalent target texts in a database and retrieve related segments during the translation of new texts.