Maria is a 45-year-old public servant. With 20 years of experience, she is quite comfortable translating 1500 words a day for her employer, a government translation department somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area. Like many of you, she is a certified ATIO translator working in official languages. Her university degree and her experience enable her to earn $75,000 a year at her job. Who is this Maria, you ask? Well, she is the average salariedtranslator at ATIO, as discovered by a recent ATIO survey. ATIO’s Salaried Translators Committee asked all 443 salaried translators to complete a one-minute on-line survey. We received 119 answers, for a response rate of 27%. If you studied translation at university, as did 76% of respondents, you probably found that women far outnumbered men in your class. This is also true of salaried translators: 81% are women. A large majority (88%) work in official languages and have a university degree in translation (76%), and almost two-thirds (64%) of them are certified. Half of the respondents hold a university degree in another field, either alone or in addition to their degree in translation. The most common second degree? A degree in language, typically French (13 people), English (5 people) or Spanish (6 people), or in literature (10 people). The majority of respondents live in the Greater Toronto Area (45%) or the National Capital Area (41%).

Respondents worked mostly for translation departments (88%) and were autonomous translators (63%), that is, they were not revised. Official languages is the area of work for most (88%). Eight percent of respondents work in foreign languages, and 4% said they work in foreign and official languages. In terms of workload, 29% of respondents translate between 1000 and 1500 words a day. Almost the same number (28%) translate between 1500 and 2000 words a day, and slightly fewer (24%) translate more than 2000 words a day. Ever wonder whether your colleagues are using translation memory software? Well, of the salaried translators who replied to the survey, 44% do. The most popular are MultiTrans, Trados, and LogiTerm. Sadly, 81% of respondents’ employers do not have a hiring policy that favours ATIO translators. If your workplace does not have such a policy, perhaps this is something worth exploring. Talk to your boss about advertising through ATIO the next time your unit is planning to hire a translator. Just over half (51%) of employers pay ATIO dues for their employees. And, like Maria, the largest group of salaried translators (29%) earns between $70,000 and $80,000 a year.