Word Count Blog

There is a number of people in the world who are paid basing on the how many words of content they produce per day. Let’s have a look at the list of professions where people would typically need a word count software to get their wages accurately.

1. Translators. All folks that are related to the translation process are word count gurus — trimming actual word count means either saving some budget or squeezing more profit. However localizers use not the pure word count, but “weighted word count” that is closely integrated with the translation memory tools.

2. Medical transcriptors. MTs have to digitize manually written or tape-written medical data. The main specific of this profession is that one has to listen and type at the same time. But a skilled medical transcriptionist is a valued worker who usually get their salary basing on the word count.

3. Commercial bloggers. These guys “blog for fun and profit”. Their task is keeping a corporate, news or whatsoever blog popular (i.e. filled with interesting content). They are paid per word of the generated content — pure word counters.

4. Freelance journalists. They are very much like commercial bloggers, but they sell their content to the “real media” (unlike of commercial bloggers they know nothing of SEO). Sometimes they are paid basing on the actual word count, but is most cases their wages are based on estimates (more details here).

5. Writers. Yes, the folks who write big books that are printed on white paper, which you can buy at Barnes & Noble. Of course there are less successful guys whose books you are hardly to find even digging all day long at Amazon. But both successful and not very successful ones are paid on the word count basis (more info on the topic you can find in the History of Word Count Metrics).

If you know any other profession, where people are paid on a per word, per character or per line basis, leave you comment and it will be included into the update to this article

Today you’ll learn about the standards and peculiarities of the word count in oriental languages. I made my mind to write about them separately, since they differ from others greatly.

Chinese. Writing unit in Chinese is hieroglyph. The main difficulty for word count is that hieroglyphs are not separated with spaces. This means that Chinese sentence «这是鸟» (This is a bird – 3 words) is counted like a single word, in case the word count tool counts words basing on the spaces between words (there was even a related query on the WordPress support page).

But if you think that these 3 hieroglyphs «工业化» are also a separate sentence, then you are wrong, since this is just an “industrialization”. So the most logical method of text volume evaluation in Chinese is character count. E.g. a 1000 word English text translated into Chinese will be 1300-1800 characters long. You may read more about the English->Chinese word count ratio here.

Japanese. Japanese is written in a mixture of three main systems — hieroglyphs and two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana. This makes word count even more complicated than in Chinese. So a usual word count scheme in Japanese is based on characters without spaces, which seems quite logical.

Korean. Modern Korean is written with spaces between words (unlike of Chinese or Japanese). Traditionally, Korean was written in columns from top to bottom, right to left, but is now usually written in rows from left to right, top to bottom. This means that the traditional word count scheme, when a word is counted on a spacing basis can be applied.

Other. The only East Asian language except mentioned above that has no spaces is Thai, so the job estimate is done basing on the character count. The rest languages, including all the Indian languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Urdu, Orya, Tamil etc), Indonesian, Farsi, Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew utilize spacing, which means that words can be easily counted with a word count tool.

To sum up. Languages that don’t have spacing and require character count include: Chinese, Japanese and Thai. The rest oriental language utilize spacing and enjoy word count instead of character count.

There is a number of jobs, where people are paid basing on how many text content do they produce, proofread, type or process in any other way. And there is a number of standards, basing on which people are paid. Anyone who had a need in word count came across several of them: 250 words, 300 words, 1800 signs or even 3500 signs. But why just not to pay on a per word basis?

Paying on a per word basis looks much simpler only from the first point of view. But every group of language is special and has its own word count traditions. Still size matters – some words are long, some words are short. So, years ago, two standard methods were developed to count words in a text. I call them Western and Soviet ones.

In Western method one word consists of six characters including spaces (average English word is 5.1 characters long). “Antiautomorphism” is 2 and 2/3 words long, which in fact equals a phrase “during the dinner”. This model is true, because it’s a bit unfair to count articles as separate meaningful words, which are usually twice as long as articles are.

Again Western word count method has 2 industry standards. In earlier times, when most manuscripts were prepared on typewriters with fixed pitch (monospace) fonts 250 words per page was generally considered to be standard, and many editors still use it. But in PC era an average manuscript page in 12 point Times Roman will contain about 23 lines of type per page and about 13 words per line, or 300 words per manuscript page.

In Soviet Union the main and dominant language was Russian. As you may know Russian has no articles, while an average Russian word is 6.36 characters long.

In the early 1920’s industry a new industry standard called “author’s list” was created. It consisted of unbelievable 40 000 signs (including spaces, number and all the punctuation). Unlike of Western standards in Soviet Union manuscripts were submitted with dual spacing, so an average typewritten page was 1800 characters long (paradox but that is 300 words in Western printing standard although average Russian word equals 1.24 English words). And if printed on a PC using 12 point Times Roman with single spacing an average page in Russian is 3500 signs big (584 Western words).

After the Soviet Union collapsed word count standards as well as a great deal of other standards were still widely used in the former republics. So if you are paid in units of 250 or 300 words, your client is most probably in Western Europe or America. But if your work is measured in 1800 or 3500 signs I bet that you got an order somewhere from Community of Independent States.

Still I have to explore the word count specifics in oriental languages. Soon an article on this topic will follow.

P.S. You can easily count word statistics almost in any document format using a word count software.