You can speed up translations involving the Geodatabase writer by lengthening the interval between committing transactions.
Committing transactions is an expensive operation and therefore it is recommended that you make the features per transaction as big as possible (or alternatively, if transactions are not needed, then you can turn them off).
In speed tests performed at Safe Software, changing the features per transaction from 500 (the default) to 1000 resulted in a specific translation being 2.5% faster. Changing the features per transaction to 5000 resulted in the same translation running 5.5% faster. Turning off transactions resulted in an improvement of either 12% or 19%. The performance advantages of changing the features per transaction or of turning transactions off will differ between various datasets.
Another way in which the speed of writing features can be increased is by creating all the feature datasets, feature classes, and non-spatial tables ahead of time so that the Geodatabase writer only needs to open them, rather than create them.