Are you reading and thinking about the next source sentence simultaneously while typing the previous sentence? If so, that’s pretty cool. If not, you’re doing tasks in series, not parallel, and I don’t think the “bottleneck” concept applies. Thus, improving your typing speed would in fact improve your translating speed.

My usual output for average texts is probably around 3000 words/day, but recently I achieved new personal records of over 8,000 words per day with high quality and not-too-unreasonable working hours. I’m still not sure how I did it, but I think there was a psychological “trick” to it. For well over 30 years people have been telling me that I “must” stop typing with one finger and learn to use ten. Recently, some have claimed it would improve my translation speed. That always sounded pretty bogus, but I never took it seriously to think about it in more detail. Then I found myself facing about 26,000 words to be done in a little over two days (a situation which came about due to illness and other unforeseen circumstances). I realized, of course, that I was doomed, and that the client was going to be very unhappy. It was an easy text, but I had been averaging about 500 words per hour with it up to that point. There were damned few repetitions. Then I did a little thinking. As a one-finger typist I manage somewhere around 40 words per minute I think. So I assumed 20 per minute. That means that I should be able to type at least 1200 words per hour. I read and understand far more than that in an hour, so the bottleneck obviously lies with the reformulation or other factors (distractions). Armed with only those thoughts, I shrugged and got to work. I averaged well over 1000 words per hour and finished the job on time, even had enough time for thorough QA and commentary. I am certainly NOT going to rely on being able to pull this off again (it was a very easy text), but the experience did show me that there is more complexity to the issue of throughput than I had realized.

I often have no work in the queue. Not for a lack of trying.