Counting beans...or words

Counting on it

So what is the story with the word count? Have you maybe even had the experience of using MS Word's word count function (Tools > Word Count) only to be told by your Language Service Provider that the word count was different? It would not be very surprising if this has indeed happened to you...

The problem with word counts is actually to a certain extent dependent on what kind of tool you use to count the words. Of course, translators take word counts very seriously. You will find that a professional translator has a pretty good idea of his or her daily (and hourly) capacity - not only because their earning capability hinges on this factor, but also because they need to be able to keep to deadlines.

With some notable exceptions (see below), most translators would count the number of words in a text and use this figure as the main variable in order to calculate the cost and time it will take to do a translation.

Exceptions - those pesky Germans

The famous exeptions to this rule are markedly the German translation market and some Asian scripts. In Germany translators very commonly would base their quotes either on the number of characters or the number of lines in a document. Some German translators even work on a per page basis. In their thorough German way, they even use the concept of 'standard lines' and 'standard pages' (in case you are interested, a standard line has 56 characters - including spaces - and a standard page would have 25 of those lines). And as always with things that come from Germany - there is some merit to this system.

The second notable exception would be those Asian scripts that do not use spaces to delimit words. So in case of a source text in Chinese or Japanese script, many Language Service providers estimate the number of 'real' words and quote on the basis of that estimate. Alternatively, one could agree on a fee that will be based on the number of words in the target language. Both solutions are interesting derivations from the fixed quote approach used for other languages.

Having read all this, you are surely not going to be surprised to hear that there are tools to help translators with the task of word counting. Interestingly, those tools sometimes produce different results from the most commonly used tool (MS Word). And if you think about it, it even makes sense.

Lou-Phil's cash

Consider this example. A French to English translator fairly often faces 'strings of words' like this:

L'argent de Louis-Philippe

Microsoft Word will find 3 words in this 'string', simply because Word just counts the spaces between the words - and where there is an apostrophe or a dash, there is usually no space. But actually, MS Word has other tricky pitfalls; it does not count words in headers or footers either unless you actually turn this option on. And as if that was not enough, MS Word (and most other tools we know of) also struggle a little when it comes to counting the number of words in diagrams made up of text boxes, or within autoshapes and other Word objects.

So what translators do is they use their own tools to get it right. They don't do this because they are interested in boosting the word count, but mainly because it is simply no fun to find addtional words while you translate - because it usually means that you have to re-negotiate not only the cost of the translation but also the timeframe for the delivery.

Avoiding a CAT-astrophe

The tools translators use to analyse the source text are usually dedicated translation enviroment tools, aka Computer Aided Translation tools (or CAT). Those tools usually recognise (sometimes even language-sensitive) word delimiters other than spaces, like punctuation marks (within strings of letters) or trailing symbols. Surprisingly, however, even these dedicated tools create different word counts.

So in other words: there is as of today no standardised way to do word counts. The rule is: different tool = different result and (usually) the more dedicated the tool, the higher the word count can be.

The bottom line, however, is that the cost of a translation is not all about the word count, but also about workflows, project management and the dedication of suppliers and all other parties involved. And in that respect Lingo24 is simply the best choice for any translation job - independent of who or what counted the words.