The (Dis)counted Hours

When you need to translate a site or a document into another language, and you receive a quote from a translation provider, it’s not unusual to find yourself a little disoriented, as the language services sector has some peculiar conventions of its own.

To learn how to interpret a business offer for translation services, let’s start with an example: A translation quote for a user’s manual for industrial machinery from Spanish to Italian.

Apart from tax details of the service provider, the quote number and the client data, the main body of the quote, that is, the lines detailing the services offered, might look something like this:

or this:

For those used to seeing services by the hour, it may be surprising to learn that translations are calculated by “words” or “folders”. But how do these quotation systems work?

How are the words of a document counted?

To calculate the number of words in a document and get an idea of the cost, you can use the word processor Microsoft Word. All you need to do is open the document and the total is displayed in the lower left bar:

Alternatively, select the Review tab, click Word Count and this window will open:

In addition to the total number of words, we can find other information, such as the number of characters, with or without spaces. This information will then be used to convert documents into lines, pages or other character-based count.

Of course, if the original document is not in Microsoft Word format, finding out how words or folders it contains gets more complicated. There are various programs out there that count the words of different file formats, like PDF for example, like PractiCountAnycount.

The total number of words might not be the same as that given by translation providers, as counting rules vary from tool to tool.

What do these differences depend on?

A text not only includes words, but also numbers, dates, alphanumeric strings, dots, hyperlinks, file paths, and so on, that are not interpreted or counted unambiguously by every tool. Without going into the differences in counting method among all the tools used by translators, we can already see why the same Word document does not always give us the same result.

Let us take the percentage as an example: if we write “30%," it counts one word. However, if you write “30 %” with a non-breaking space between the number and the symbol, it counts two. And yet we have written the same thing.

Let’s take another example using a bullet point and a numbered list. If we write:

“The package contains:

  - an installation kit
  - a quick start guide
  - a user manual”

Word calculates 13 words.

However, if we write:

“The package contains:

1.  an installation kit
2.  a quick start guide
3.  a user manual"

it calculates 16 instead, because the numbers on the bulleted list are considered to be words.

So, it’s not hard to see that if the same tool can give varying results, it’s even more likely that different tools use different counting rules.

Counting differences aside, quotes based on the total word count have the advantage of being more transparent for the client. Folder-based quotes, on the other hand, can be more difficult to interpret.

The folder-based quoting system dates back to the age of the typewriter, when counting was based on the number of pages on paper. This system has survived and remained in use even after the advent of computers. So what is meant by folder these days?

That depends.

There is no standard definition for folders.

If we are talking about technical translations, one folder is equivalent to a page of 25 lines with 55/60 characters per line (totalling 1375 - 1500 characters, spaces included).

For legal translations on paper, like a birth certificate for example, a folder is equal to 25 lines and 50 characters per line (totalling 1250 characters, spaces included).

In publishing, a folder is equivalent to a typed page of 2000 characters, spaces included.

Converting a document into folders is a very simple operation. As we saw above, Microsoft Word also displays the number of characters, spaces included, in the word count window:

Let’s take the total number of characters and divide it by 1500, the number of characters per page.

For example, a document with 12000 characters, spaces included, corresponds to 8 folders.

In addition to counting by folder and by word, there is also counting by line. Again, there is no standard number of characters, but the average is 55. This counting method was widespread in the age of typewriters, which let the user set a fixed number of characters per line and then count the lines. This has now fallen into disuse in countries like Italy and Spain, but it is still used in Germany and for languages similar to German that tend to have longer words than average.

How much does a translation cost?

So how much do words or folders cost? This depends on a range of factors, with two of them being particularly important:

• the language combination, i.e. the language of the original text and the language it is to be translated into (e.g. a translation from English to Italian costs less than a translation from Arabic to Italian)
• the subject of the text.

Other secondary factors then also play a role, such as:

• the type of translation required: technical, literary, sworn, advertising, etc.
• urgency
• the format of the text to be translated.

It is easy to see why the cost of a translation depends on the text type and urgency, but the reason file format has an effect on the quote is not quite so obvious. 

Here’s why.

In order to translate, industry professionals use what are called assisted translation tools, also known as CAT tools. These are software packages that bring together various tools for translation (glossaries, dictionaries, spell-checkers and grammars) and allow you to manage all kinds of files: Not just Word files (.doc o .docx), but also InDesign (.indd), .html and .xml, to give just a few examples. All these formats, however, are editable: to calculate the total number of words or translate the text, simply open the document.

However, there is one type of file that translators just don’t like at all: PDF (acronym for Portable Document Format). It is a widely-used format because it allows documents to be viewed and shared independently of the operating system used, and the content to be made unmodifiable (with the right tricks), i.e. to create a real digital “photocopy” of the original.

To manage a PDF with an assisted translation tool, it needs to be converted to an editable format: a process that requires time and specific software. At best, if the text can be selected, it can be exported to an editable file and then counted and translated. At worst, if the document is a scan, it won’t be possible to export or translate the text at all. The only option is to use an optical character recognition programme (OCR), but to do that, you will need to spend a good deal of time editing the document before calculating the quote and translating it.

All these operations have an impact on the final cost of a translation.

To learn more, go to “How to Count, Edit, and Translate PDF Files”.

Services provided

In terms of the services provided, a translation quote may include different services, for example:

• revision
• project management
• modifying and converting files
• formatting, layout, desktop publishing (which are billed separately, per page or per hour).

Revision is often measured by the hour, but even then prices vary according to the type of service required:

• monolingual revision (proofreading): using the translated text only
• bilingual revision (editing): this involves comparing the original text with the translated version
• bilingual revision with error reports: as above, but with an error report
• post-revision or post-editing: proofreading a text translated with an automatic translation engine.

Discounts

As we have seen, translations prices are calculated on a per word or per folder basis, proofreading or layout is billed per hour, and there are factors that can make the price go up. 

But how are discounts calculated?

There are three kinds of discounts:

• discount as a percentage of total service fees
• discount per each quoted item
• discount per “match” or “repetition”.

To understand how the latter works, we’ll need to make a quick digression.

Let’s take the example of a client who wants the technical data sheets of a range of products, the instruction manual and perhaps also the dedicated web page translated. Since these products are similar, a number of phrases will be repeated throughout the document. These repetitions are called “matches” in technical jargon. And it is by these that discounts are calculated. 

How does a translator know that there are sentences repeated throughout the documentation and know when to apply a discount?

Giving discounts based on matches or repetitions implies using specialised computer programs to assist the translation process, i.e. the CAT tools we discussed above. It is especially important to consider the “translation memory” function, which is the possibility of archiving all translations made in a database so they can be retrieved when a similar text is translated.

Let’s take the previous example. Let’s assume that the “Operating temperature” entry is present on 10 data sheets. Here we have 2 words that add up to a total of 20 when multiplied by the number of sheets.

If the service provider decides to take “matches” (in this case, repetitions) into account, the quote will be calculated by counting 2 words instead of 20. The service provider considers that once the term “Operating temperature” has been translated once, it will not have to be translated again.

Obviously, this is very much oversimplifying the matter, and this example should only serve to demonstrate how it is that the client will not have to pay for every word in a document. We will talk about how machine translation tools, matches, and repetitions work, and the benefits for clients who work with professionals who use these programs in another article.

So, in the end, if you are buying a translation, do you really need to know these things? In the end, what the client is interested in is having the document translated, and knowing what that will cost. However, knowing that a quote can be calculated in different ways can allow you to compare two quotes. This way, if one is based on the total number of words and the other on folders, you will be able to make a conversion and evaluate the price difference. Or, if you send a PDF document, you’ll know why it costs so much more.

The better you know the translation services sector, the better you will be able to evaluate the offers you receive and make more informed choices.