Word Count Blog

It is commonly understood that writing professionals get paid by word count. And most often it is so.

But still, it is not the only way of defining the charge for your work.  And in some cases, word count is just not the right method to estimate the work you have done.

Writers should not aim to create a long text, but a good one.  In that case, getting paid by word count may lead you to the longest novel you’ve ever written, but not the best one. So in her blog ”Should Writers Be Paid By Word Count?” Laura Spencer suggests setting the quote by word count range (for example, “around 3000 words” or “600 to 800 words”).

Translators’ productiveness may range depending on the text. For example, you can translate 500 words of an average text an hour, but get stuck with the same 500 words of technical text for good 3 hours. You can, of course, define the rates depending on the text specialization. Or, as Corinne McKay describes in her article “How To Set Your Translation Rates By Using Objective Information”,   you can set your rates per hour.

I hope you will be paid well no matter what you charge for.

12: 4972/4283/697/55

I guess professional translators and other professionals often dealing with word count are well acquainted with this magic formula. Are you?

You may count your productiveness as, for example, 1 page per day. How much is it in characters? Characters with spaces? Lines? Being commonly asked to create text with certain word count, I still sometimes get lost. So I took a page of plain text with little formatting and the statistics is…

	Characters with spaces	Characters without spaces	Words	Lines
10 pt	4972	4283	697	55
12 pt	3838	3311	535	46

Just to keep in mind, the average one spaced page contains usually about 3000 characters or 500 words. Depending on the text formatting a page word count may include from 200 (large print) up to 600 words (academic book).

Let’s imagine that you are freelance translator and your customer asked you to translate a file in PDF format. As usual PDF files are recognized and it is not a problem to count words in such files. Just copy the text to MS Word and perform word counting using a built-in word count engine. So, you implicitly agree on this job. But when you get this PDF file and open it, you understand that it is unrecognized. You may know that there is possible to combine in PDF both recognized text and unrecognized images. Let’s imagine also that unfortunately you didn’t agree with your customer that for scan jobs you are paid on a per hour basis and therefore your customer demands job to be done on a per word basis.

So, you need to count words in this PDF file in any ways. How can you perform this? There are two methods to count words in PDF file: free of charge and paid…

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With the use of specialized word count tools giving the possibility to count words and numbers separately, the charge for the numbers in source text is being discussed.

Although it may seem obvious that translators “do nothing with the numbers”, there are still situations when numbers add some very thorough work for translators:

1.   When numbers are to be translated (for example, change 123 to one hundred twenty-three)

2.  When numbers are to be checked or proofread, especially concerning large number massive

 

So if you are thinking on whether to include the numbers in your paid word count, just estimate your effort spent on them first.

As I stated in my previous post, I wanted to investigate the statement that word usually shows less word count results than other word count tools. So I ran a little experiment … and you are welcome to share the results with me.

Data:

We have two MS Word documents, 1 with plain text and 1 with different text objects included.

I decided to use 3 tools for quick word count evaluation: MS Word Statistics, online word count tool and a specialized word count tool.

Stage 1: Plain Text

Please follow my results on the screenshots below.

Total of 330 words

 

 

 

 

 

Total of 328 words

 

 

 

 

 

Total of 330 words (including 2 numbers)

 

 

 

 

Conclusion: the only word count difference is made by numbers. There are two of them in text, but I guess the translation client wouldn’t want to pay for them as for words if there are more.

 

Stage 2: Text+ different text objects (my document included text boxes, WordArt object, Shape, footers, headers and an embedded Excel table)

 

Total of 707 words (the possibility of counting textboxes, footnotes and endnotes in new MS Word versions is completely new to me)

 

 

 

 

Total of 431 words (see, it is supposed to be table in stead of white space)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Total of 865 words (including 28 numbers)

 

 

 

Conclusion: 707/431/865. Indeed, MS Word shows less word count results than specialized word count tool, but more than online word count engine.

As a translator, you will be paid

…very little according to online word count.

… more for 28 numbers, but underpaid for 130 words in text objects according to MS Word Statistics.

… according to the accurate word count in specialized word count tool.

 

General conclusion: if you work with plain text only and don’t care for the numbers, you may sure rely on any of the word count tools. But if your document is more complicated than that – well, the decision is up to you.

 

Those are my results. Maybe I should have included something else? Tell me