Labor of Sisyphus
The milestone of any business is that the customer wants
to minimize
the cost and the contractor wants to maximize the income.
So what
interpreter usually calls a “good bargain” in
fact appears to be
only a compromise between the minimal expenses imagined
by the customer
and maximal revenue expected by the interpreter.
One of the biggest injustices of interpreting business
is that
interpreter is paid only for translation job basing on
the quantity of
visible words and characters; while time spent on formatting
the
document is left unpaid. These characters aren’t
“crumbs” at all
as you may think.
MS Office – Delusive Word Count
For example MS Office statistics is somewhat delusive
both in character
count and in word count. . My colleagues have found out
that the
following characters aren’t included in the statistics:
- running headers
- running footers
- end notes
- text boxes etc.
So in the documents with complex formatting you involuntarily
make an
up to 10% discount to your customer.
HTML – Hunting for Tags
When translating an HTML document interpreters usually
translate not
only the content on the page, but SEO-valuable tags as
well. These
include the following tags: title, keywords, alt etc.
But when it comes to counting you have to copy everything
into Word
again, delete those tags manually spending another 10
minutes/page and
loose revenue with Word count statistics again.
Get Paid in Full – Use Word Count Tools
Now you see that word count tools developed for general
use may not fit
you. But there is another category of word count tools,
developed
exactly for interpreters, that counts all words and characters
present
on the page.
One of the most effective word count tools is AnyCount
– word count
software, which provides exact word count statistics in
the following
bunch of formats: RTF, DOC, WPD, XLS, PPT, PPS, PDF, CSV,
HTM, HTML,
XML, MIF, TXT, ZIP, ODT, SDW, SXW, ODS, SDC, SXC, ODP,
SDD, SXI, HLP,
and CHM.
Additionally AnyCount is powered with the multifile support.
The
software is capable of processing tens of files in various
formats. If,
for example, freelance copy-writer has several HTML pages,
DOC report
on the job done and RTF instructions for customers’
marketing
department, AnyCount will take all these files in and
do exact word
count.
The software is capable of counting words, characters
with or without
spaces. And if users have their own word count units they
can add them
into the interface. Having finished counting AnyCount
can either print
the statistics or export it to a printable RTF file that
can be opened
with most text editors.
Article by Thomas Vysokos
Kyiv, 2008
