 Hello fellow freelancers. So today I wanted to talk about I received a number of questions on my course that I've been dealing with And I thought they might be interesting to talk about with you guys and to make videos about and so I'm gonna be addressing one of those today And more specifically, I'm going to be addressing something that has to deal with word counts Now I've talked about counting words before and how that applies, but I haven't really gone into detail And this could be one of those examples of how something that might seem obvious to me because I'm so in deep into freelance translation actually might not be obvious at all to someone who's first starting out and Could be a question they have and so I wanted to address this basically the question that I had was this One of the students had asked When I count the words to a text that needs to be translated should I count the kind of conjunction words like and any Stuff like that a you know little words that Conjunctions or articles anyway these small words should I count them because they don't Make up the substance the main substance of the text, but there's still words there So I don't know if I should count them as words and so I want to give my response to this because it's a bit Multifaceted first of all. Yes, absolutely. You count them. You count every single word you have to translate And so if they give you a text of 1000 words, that's 1000 words That you need to translate so you quote 1000 words There are some issues with this and possibly accept exceptions. I'll get into that at the end, but Let's start with a premise that if they give you a text of 1000 words You try you have a certain price per word and I've mentioned this before that the best way to Have a price is a price per word of the source text So you say, okay, my price is whatever per word times x number of words. That's how much it costs fine now There are a couple issues When you receive this text, how do you count the words and I wanted to address this because obviously she's counting them word by word if she's counting the any and all and a and or or and all these small words and You usually don't eat you hardly ever need to do that. In fact, I Never I can't remember the last time I did that. There are many ways to count words In which you don't need to do it yourself. First of all, if you have Microsoft Word put the text in there And you get the word count it should in fact It depends on the version of Microsoft Word But it's either already written there at the bottom the number of words and you'll see it written there at the bottom I think at the bottom left or if you go under tools and again It depends on the version so you need to check for what type of Microsoft Word you have But there should be an option there under tools to count the words and that's it It's very easy. It gives you the number of words and so once again there you have your price per word This is a number of words. Okay, that's what it'll cost me. That's what it'll cost the client and That should be set. What if you don't have Microsoft Word? You can always copy and paste the text into Microsoft Word I mean if they give you a text that's not in it But what if you don't have Microsoft Word at all and you want to do the translation first of all I recommend having Microsoft Word or some version thereof because you're gonna get a lot of texts in that But if you don't have it You can also go online just I mean, I don't I don't even remember the websites But there are a lot of them just google word count and there will be a plate There'll be one of those websites where you can just paste the text in there and it'll give you a total word count And that that'll be quite easy and in fact, it'll many of them do really cool things Like show you the most common words and how they're situated and all that but Just to get a word count is very easy go google word count and How to get a word count whatever it is and you'll find a place that does it and you just paste the text in there and it's very easy now This is how it works and this is how it should work. I wanted to get into some of the variations. So for someone like Uh, like this lady who asked me the question Someone in her shoes I would I would say just to take the text get the word count either from microsoft word or one of those places online And then you have the total number of words in the document And you know what to charge the client because it's the total number of words times Your price per word and that's the price you charge Now let's get into some of the weird variations that might pop up First of all, you might get say like a scanned document or you know an image or something like that So there's no way to do a word count because you can't get text from there Uh, so what you can do here what you can do is use an ocr I've mentioned ocr before optical character recognition This is something that scans whatever image there and tries to parse out the text and you can get a word count from that It won't be very precise. What you usually see happen here is uh, is I mean people might try that but usually what you see happens people will charge Rather than per the source word per word of source text They'll charge per target word per word of target text and you can do this as well Uh, so what happens is the client sends you something a scanned page and you say well My price is a whatever number of cents per per target text and uh per target word and So that's how it is and so the client says yes or no and then you go ahead There are a couple of drawbacks with this obviously first of all You and the client don't know a final cost a final price until it's actually finished because you don't know How many words they're going to be until you've actually carried out the translation and that can be a bit iffy Um, and so what you end up doing many times is trying to estimate how many words there will be and That can be an issue as well because because you need to keep in mind That a lot of texts the same text in one language will have a different number of words in a different language I've noticed when I translate from Italian into English if it has say 1000 words in Italian, it'll have 1000 and uh, I mean it could be anywhere from say 1100 to 1300 words in English So there's always yeah about 10 to even 30 percent more like 1.1 to 1.3. Yeah It's usually not a full 30 percent, but it'll be around 10 more words This actually works to my favor if I charge per target word But if you charge if you translate from English into Italian, it could work against you So keep this in mind some translators have a different rate for source word and for target word because of just for that reason And so when you can do there is say look my rate per target word is so and so and if they accept it fine And then you can move on One other thing I should say I shouldn't have to say but I will say that you need to keep in mind When you charge per target word, you're going to find something that you're translating the text into target word And you start thinking wait a minute I'm getting paid per word here, but I'm writing the number of words So why don't I write more words and that's when you start finding people writing stuff like instead of The man's jacket. They'll be like the jacket belonging to the man or whatever And you know anyone who's written an essay in college and has tried to get more words in because they need a certain number of words They know all the tricks he can play I would strongly advise against playing any of these tricks everyone seen them before and The people looking over your job aren't going to be some teacher who just rolls his eyes be like Okay, he's trying to get more words. Whatever. No, because it's their money out of their pocket So they're going to notice that stuff first of all second of all, they aren't going to hire you again If you want a client for the long term Don't do that. Don't play those games because now I'm someone who's hiring translators and I see it right away If first of all if someone's charging per target text My antennae are already up because I know people like to play those games second of all You notice it when they do it and I notice it if they don't do it and really appreciate it because right away I'm like, okay. That's an honest translator who is just concentrating on the translation I'm not trying to play little games here and there. You don't want to look like you're playing little games Just translate the text the number of words that come out. That's the number of words You know, don't don't play text and don't play games and look it's even if you get Marginal number of extra words because you play these games. It won't make any difference It doesn't make that much difference at all. In fact, you might lose a client. So it'll make A lot of difference in that sense So if you are charging Ideally you charge per source word and you find a way to do that if you can't charge per target word and And then you'll end up Knowing the exact amount once you finish it You can kind of get an estimate through ocr or something ahead of time But you'll know for sure once you finish it also because when you're typing you're typing on word or something like that And so it's a lot. Obviously you can get the word count very easily at that point um Now there's one other example that you might have like someone might say hand you a book And they'll say here's a do I have a book handy? No, obviously I don't so they'll say here's a book Can you translate this how many words are there here? Obviously you can't use a word count you Want to come up with a good price before you do the translation because This is a whole book is a huge translation And so you need to come up with a good price even for yourself Because they probably don't care about your price per word or even whether it be target word or source word They want a whole price for the whole book. I wish I had a book. Yeah, here we go That's a bit too thick, but if you have a book say like this, you know, they're not going to want to Have a price per word. They're going to want to know how much it costs to translate the whole thing So you need to figure out A way to do this now the way you can check out a price per Uh Per word there is basically to do an estimate and you can tell the client This is an estimate to be confirmed upon delivery to be confirmed upon completion of translation to be confirmed upon You know, whatever you can just add that to the bottom of your email or whatever you send them as a quote If you need to estimate the number of words that there are what you can do is You take the text Take the first whatever number of Of lines that you feel comfortable with the more the better obviously because you're going to be more precise But say take 10 lines or 20 if you can take 20, that's better Take 20 and count the number of words In those 20 lines, let's say divided by 20 and you have the average number of words per line Now look how many lines there are per page take that average number of words per line and Then times it times the number of lines per page And then you times it times the number of pages obviously They're good. You have to you're going to have to make a couple issues You're going to have to take a couple things into into account. Sorry because A lot of some pages will end like that And then the next chapter kind of starts a bit further down and you know, you have stuff like that Uh, you you're also going to have dialogue. I don't know if there's any dialogue handy here Anyway, many times dialogue is only in the margin and it doesn't take up the whole thing You're going to have little sections like that. So that's why it's very much an estimate take it into account You want if you want to be safe beyond you know a bit on the high side or something like that But I would just come up with a good estimate and tell The client this is an estimate to be confirmed upon completion of translation because it's impossible To tell what the exact number of words will be At this point in time By the way, when you're translating books many times you can do a translation You have a rate per page or something like that. So I'm just trying to give you an example of how to Make a word count when you have a huge number of words Let's say one thing one other thing that I should mention when you have a long translation Like when you have any long translation But when you have a long translation such as where you have to estimate the number of words remember That You don't want to wait until you've completed the whole thing to get paid So many things can go arey can go wrong Maybe you're doing it the wrong way or the client isn't happy or the client isn't Honest or I don't know something like that. So you ask for milestones And by the way, I do this for every client I have if it's a new client Especially if they ask for something that's over X amount. I tell them They usually like it because it means that you're you have experience with this and you know where you're doing So if someone gives you say a whole book to translate you tell them Look, I'd be happy to do it. And you know, this is the price upon confirmation blah, blah, blah But with any new client, I uh, I need to get paid after the first $100 invoiced whatever you want to say or you know, thousand words or whatever it might be And so uh, and so after say the first two chapters I will perform the first two chapters send them to you and once I receive payment for that I'll continue with the rest Anyway, this was a long thing and in fact, I veered off a bit. Sorry about that Word count is an important aspect. It's usually quite easy to count the number of words or or either way to figure them out And if you can't you can always charge per target word keep in mind that when you have different languages The amount of the target word Count can be a bit different from the source word count. So you want to keep that in mind By the way, it's not that much different You know, I mentioned it can be different by 10 to 20 percent when you're dealing with Italian to English Where it really makes a difference is when you have a language say from Chinese to English or English to Chinese Because you have characters in Chinese, but you have words in English and the number of characters versus the number of words can be very different So keep that in mind because if you're translating the same text and you per source word It's going to be very different than if you price it per target word or target character So these are things you do need to keep in mind um, but yeah, uh, hopefully you can figure it out and Hopefully it makes sense to you And once again, once you've done this a couple times you will get the hang of it and it'll become easier and easier at the time It goes by but I hope you found this useful If you do, please don't forget to click like and subscribe and all that good stuff and I'll see you in the next video Thanks. Bye