How Fast is Machine Translation?

The speed of machine translation varies depending on the many factors such as the size of the engine, the language pair (more complex languages such as Chinese and Japanese have additional processing requirements such as word segmentation) and the format of the document being translated.

Language Studio V5 translates at 9,000 words per minute on a single instance of a Hybrid Neural Machine Engine. With the release of Language Studio V6 translation speed has been increased to between 40,000-45,000 words per minute on the identical hardware. Language Studio is very scalable. Some of Omniscien’s larger customers are translating more than 10 billion words per day.

Adding a little Context:

While estimates vary, the general consensus is that the total number of professional translators in the whole world is around 300,000. If all of these translators were to work on the same day and translated at an average speed of 2,500 words per day, the total combined output per day would be 750 million words. Thus, all professional translators combined would deliver an output volume that is the equivalent to just 75% of the daily output from one of Omniscien’s larger customers. Clearly it is not practical to edit text when it is produced in this volume, but editing is not always required as described in the answer to the question “Who uses machine translation?”.