What 8,434 Documents Say About My Work

My ProZ.com profile lists my specializations. Recently I checked them against my own files: I went through my agency folder and sorted every document by field.

The folder held 12,456 files, which came down to 8,434 unique documents. Each one was labelled by an SI model, using the file name, the folder, and the first 1,500 characters of the text. I then checked a sample of 60 labels by hand. About 90 percent were right, which is good enough for a picture, not for a precise ranking.

The picture

Legal work is the largest group, at 30.6 percent. Inside it, contracts and corporate documents make up 20.3 percent, legislation and government instruments 6.2 percent, and litigation and court papers 4.1 percent.

Civil and personal documents come second, at 19.2 percent: birth and marriage certificates, family cards, the papers people need for visas and study abroad.

Together, those two groups are 49.8 percent, or half of everything.

After that come finance, banking and insurance (12.0 percent), academic credentials (6.6 percent), media and subtitling (4.7 percent), and medical and life sciences (3.3 percent). Smaller groups include HR and corporate policy, trade and logistics, construction, real estate, energy and mining.

Who signs the contracts

There were 1,709 legal contracts. Where a sector could be identified, energy led with 219, then construction (141), IT (118), trade (111), banking (84) and medical (79). Around 695 had no sector tagged. The banking group, I noticed, is mostly loan, security and pledge agreements. Traditional banking, in other words, more than fintech.

What the numbers do not say

These are document counts. They say nothing about length or effort. A one-page birth certificate counts the same as an eighty-page facility agreement, and a patient questionnaire that went through five review rounds counts once.

That is why medical work looks small here, at 3.3 percent, even though my profile leads with it. Both are true. The medical documents are fewer, and they take more care per page. I would not want anyone to read a count as a measure of where the hours go.

The folder also holds what was received, which can include reference files and templates, and I did not look at dates. So this is a snapshot of volume, not a timeline.

What I take from it

The result is clear enough. My working life is mostly legal and civil paper, and the precision those documents need is the habit I bring to everything else. The clinical work is a smaller share, but it is the work that tests that habit hardest.

If you are a translator and have never done this with your own files, I recommend it. Your profile says what you do. Your folder says what you actually did.