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

An experienced word count user may already have noticed that there can be slight and even substantial differences in word count results produced by different word count engines. Surprised? Let’s find out what is the reason for that.

Currently there are no rules or system defining what instruments or scheme should be used for word count and different word count tools use their own schemes for word count. And the most important question here is what to count. Well, words, obviously, but it appears that different programs include different meanings in this single object.

Microsoft Word Statistics, the most common unspecific word counting instrument, considers everything between two spaces a word, be it a number or a symbol. On the other hand, Word doesn’t include in its word count statistics the text in text boxes or shapes, that may sometimes happen to add a significant number of words to your word count.

The specific word count tools are more accurate here. Usually, a user can define whether to count numbers or not and whether to include the text from additional objects to the word count statistics. The best word count tools are usually armed with word count opportunities in footers, headers, notes, footnotes, end notes, text boxes, shapes,  text in embedded and linked documents, comments and hidden text. Also they can provide the word count in a large number of file formats. For example, AnyCount counts text in 36 file formats!

It is also said that because of these differences the word count produced by specific word count tools usually scores more words/units than word count in Microsoft Word. But I guess I’d like to find that out myself and do some research on the matter. So just look forward to it!

It may appear that your profession is not word counter. Not really? Then I guess you can be misled by some of the word count-related terms.  So I place here several basic ones:

Word count itself
‘The word count is the number of words in a document or passage of text”, says Wikipedia. I wouldn’t dare to argue, but would add that word count is often used instead of text count.

Text count
Text count, to follow Wiki’s scheme, is a number of  words, lines, characters (with or without spaces), pages or other defined units in a text.

Word
Yes. Although it may seem ridiculous, we often can’t define what actually a word for the counting engine is. For example, for Word processor a word is everything between two spaces, including numbers. Smarter word count tools can make the difference between the words and other symbols, allowing a word to be a word in its offline meaning.

Word limit
Is often used by editors to define the length of the desired text.

Source word count

As translators are usually charged per source word, a source word count is needed to know the number of words in the source text. If a translator can’t count words in a source text (i.e. hard copies), the payment is set by the target word count.

Target word count -

the number of words in a translated document.

Hope it wasn’t too many terms for 1 post. But I’m still wondering about all the “footers, headers, notes, footnotes, end notes, text boxes, shapes, embedded and linked documents, comments and hidden text”. Are you?

It’s nice not to be limited in word count and write whatever you are up to just as you do on your personal blog or in your diary. But what if your absolutely perfect article doesn’t meet the word count limit set up by the editor? It seems that you have it all linked together, but your editor won’t buy it.  So there is what you can do here

1. Make sure all the information is essential

If you have several points of view, find out if they are all equally important.

2. Join the sentences

Try joining sentences you think could be joined.

3. Cut the introduction

It is not the most important thing you have to say, is it?

4. Get rid of the scenery

Don’t be overly descriptive. When your heroine is “breathtakingly beautiful”, ideas “unbelievably outstanding” and the sky is “sparkling-blue”… Well, there is a risk your word count would be “absolutely and roughly violating the word count limit”

5. Consider the quotes

Although your speakers are worth quoting, maybe there is a chance to say it all in a couple of words without loosing the idea.

6. Use graphics

See if there are some points you can SHOW in stead of explaining.

7. Make sure your word count is accurate

Check your word count units (words, lines or characters, etc). If you have many text boxes or embedded documents, you may need the word count tool to make sure you meet the limit.

And if you already are a successful text-count-cutter, please share your own tips.

Word count: 254

I work in the same company with Dmitry Chaplay, chief developer of a word count software called AnyCount. Recently Dmitry and the R&D team released AnyCount 7.0 and made a kind of breakthrough in the word count experience by introducing the word count for image files (BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG).

This is a piece of remarkable industry news, since guys are the first, who put OCR feature into a word count tool. So I took my favorite mug and went to Starport (so we call AIT’s R&D center) for a coffee with Dmitry.

T: Dima, what’s the idea lies behind the AnyCount?

D: It’s pretty simple and obvious – just customizable word, character or line count.

T: And nothing more?

D: And did you expect a text editor in the word count software? Multipurpose tools show average performance in a big variety of fields, but provide extensive functionality only for 1 or 2 tasks. Look at the MS Word – it is a cool text editor, but when it comes to the word count statistics AnyCount provides a more accurate one.

T: AIT developers were the first ones, who introduced word count in the image files (BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG). Was that a kind of strategic vision from the marketing point of view?

D: No, actually it is already a need. Our support department gets a pile of requests from translation agencies like this: “We’ve got a scanned contract, how can we count the word statistics to quote the client?” So we acquired an OCR engine, optimized it and incorporated into AnyCount.

T: Must be easy only to say, but in fact there is a big deal of real work behind it Some days ago I tried out a free word count in graphic files and had my result for free without paying a penny. So what do people pay for with OCR in AnyCount?

D: Hm, if I tell you that they pay for the comfort you won’t believe, huh?

T: Me? Definitely not

D: Actually our OCR solution support 20+ languages and the most of free tools go only with 7 of them (like English, Spanish, Portuguese, where the rest 4 vary from tool to tool). So your method of free OCR won’t work in the Cyrillic languages.

T: You almost made me believe that comfort matters But what about the future? You know, a successful product always needs to be two steps ahead of user expectations. Do you already have any ideas of improving AnyCount?

D: We have just released a major update It’s not that just “bang! Idea now – a new feature tomorrow”. We need to analyze the user’s requests, target the new test formats. But I promise that as soon as we find something worth improvement, we’ll bring it to the life.

The dinner break was almost over so I had to run back to Babylon (AIT translation division office) and go back to my PM’s duties. Stay in touch – more word count tips and news are on their way.