 Today's video is about word count and word counts in different languages and how to deal with them in translation Let's start from the beginning in Translation you have the source text and you have the target text source text is in the source language That's where it comes from and the target text will be in the target language once you've translated it It'll be in the target language usually you charge per word and Usually you charge per source word because the translation isn't done yet So you have to take the source text see how many words there are and you charge per word So obviously a word count is the number of words in that document in that source document. There are many ways to count words I'm assuming you know how to do it if you have Microsoft Word then It's there under tools I think or something otherwise other programs have it or worst-case scenario you can always copy and paste the text and Plug it into a website just search for word count website something and something will pop up Then you can count the number of words then you can tell the client, okay I'm gonna charge this much total or so, you know, I'm gonna make this much etc etc now Sometimes you don't know the word count because you receive a PDF or a scanned document or something along those lines You don't know what the word count is but you still need to give a price to the client before you give them the translation There's several ways to go about this. First of all, you should know what an OCR tool is I've done a video on this before it's optical character recognition I think there's several websites There's one I use all the time which I recommended in my video and I can link to it down below The way it works is it scans the documents and it recognizes words and letters and then it puts them into text This makes it very easy to take a PDF document that's been scanned and put it into text And so you can have a precise word count. However Many times you can't do this might be a bad scan or there might be many times with legal forms You find all these stamps on top and so it's hard to get an estimate or maybe they give you physical documents that you Need to scan yourself, but you don't want to do all that just for a quote or I don't know something along those lines So sometimes it's not possible in these cases when you don't know the word count of the source text then Usually what ends up happening is that you can charge a price per target word You can base it off the word count of the target text So this means that once you're done with the translation then you count the number of words and you can say, okay my prices X say it's 10 cents a word and At the end you have a thousand words and so that's a hundred bucks Of course, you can't tell the client that until you've translated it So what you'll tell them is my prices 10 cents a word and then you'll realize that it's a thousand words once you're finished Now if you followed so far, hopefully this wasn't too convoluted you might be thinking okay Well if I translate from one language to the other and I get paid for the word count of this of the target text I'll just make it very flourishing language very Expressive language very artsy maybe and add all these adjectives and add a whole bunch of conjunction You know a whole bunch of words just to make it longer so I get paid more I mean no I recommend not to do this because first of all the client knows that if they're paying you for the target text at a price per target word then That your temptation is to make more target words so you get paid more So they'll be on the lookout for this and your client isn't stupid I don't care who your client is, but they're probably not stupid You shouldn't be playing these games also in the long term You're gonna make a lot more money by having a good reputation to be a good translator Rather than playing these games and trying to get a couple more extra cents here and there and at the end of the Day, it's not gonna be all that much more no matter how many adjectives you put in there I don't care what you get paid per word, but you know even a 10 cents a word You're gonna you're gonna waste more time trying to find different adjectives to get more money than you know Trying to find another job. However, there is one thing you should keep in mind a thousand words in one language Does not mean a thousand words in another language I translate from Italian to English if I would text us a thousand words in Italian on average that'll equal 1,300 words in English now you can see where the issue comes here if I charge 10 cents a word and there are 1,000 words that'll come out to a hundred bucks. However, if I charge 10 cents a word and it's 1,300 words That'll come to 130 bucks and it can be a lot more further languages for Chinese to English. I think it's 1.7 however so if your Target language has more words Usually then your source language then you're actually fine. I if I were you I would charge the same It depends what the ratio is obviously but I wouldn't worry too much about having to charge per target text rather than source text In fact, it can be to your advantage. I do Italian to English So for me, it's not too much of a problem if I have to deal with the target text. I can have the same word count and The extra number of words that usually comes out Definitely makes up for the fact that I don't know how many words They're going to be and that level of uncertainty plus having to deal with a PDF However, if you're the other way around if you translate from English to Italian then it can be an issue There's several ways to go about this one would be to keep it in mind and then just quote a price for the whole Document the whole translation you're going to have to estimate a bit and Again, this depends on language, but many times they say like for English. It's around 300 words per page You know depending or you can use an OCR program to figure out an approximate number of words, etc Otherwise you can say there's a surcharge for dealing with scanned documents or PDFs or photocopies I'm not sure how well the client would take that But by all means you can do it because it is harder to deal with the PDF for a scanned document especially if you're using a cat tool and You want to copy and paste the text into the cat tool so you so it can help you out You can't do that with a PDF document Of course clients don't want to hear that and they don't understand all that and so They're not going to be very receptive They're not going to be happy about the idea of being charged more because they happen to have a PDF So again, my advice will be to charge for the whole document Get an estimate of the number of words and then charge a bit more if the if the ratio is 1.3 then Charge cover that 30% Just in case because you're gonna have fewer words in the target language than the source language So you want to make sure you get paid what you would have gotten paid or just do it a couple times and charge the same amount Per word per target word and see what happens. Maybe there's not that much difference And it doesn't bother you as much definitely something to keep in mind After you do a few translations, you'll get more used to it and you get more of a feel for this But when you're first starting out, you might not know this So especially if there's a big difference between the two languages Definitely keep this in mind and worst case scenario, you can educate the the client, right? You can tell them look on average. There are 1.3 or 1.7 Words in in this language as compared to the other language. So of course it's gonna cost more. That's just normal Hopefully this helps hopefully this clears it up a bit if you have any questions about it Feel free to let me know and I'll be happy to help with anything in the meantime If you found this useful and you want other videos about translation freelance translation or freelancing in general Then feel free to subscribe. Please click that like button and it always helps and I'll see you in the next video Thanks. Bye sabedum and and and and and and so and so