A new word count ratio tool
Thread poster: Tomedes
Tomedes
Tomedes
United States
Local time: 02:47
Member (1970)
French to English
+ ...
Jun 30, 2013

Check out this new word count ratio tool -www.tomedes.com/word-count-ratio-tool,
it can be quite helpful for you guys.
It's based on crowd sourcing so feel free to add data from your own experience to make it as accurate
as can be for all your fellow translators to enjoy.
I'll be happy to read your feedback:)

[Edited at 2013-06-30 10:47 GMT]


 
Nikita Kobrin
Nikita Kobrin  Identity Verified
Lithuania
Local time: 12:47
Member (2010)
English to Russian
+ ...
What is it for? Jul 1, 2013

Interesting tool but I'm just thinking of it and can't decide how I can possibly use it. What's its purpose? Any suggestions?

Nikita Kobrin


 
Tomedes
Tomedes
United States
Local time: 02:47
Member (1970)
French to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Here's what it's good for Jul 1, 2013

Nikita Kobrin wrote:

Interesting tool but I'm just thinking of it and can't decide how I can possibly use it. What's its purpose? Any suggestions?

Nikita Kobrin


The tool is mainly helpful for translators who charge by target word count and up until now had to guess or base their estimation on private experience.
Since the tool feeds from crowd sourcing, it gains tons of knowledge from different translators' experiences and is therefore able to provide a more accurate estimation.


 
harryngh (X)
harryngh (X)
Spain
Another site Jul 2, 2013

There are many sites offer that tools, depending on the purposes of yours

[Edited at 2013-07-02 23:22 GMT]


 
Nikita Kobrin
Nikita Kobrin  Identity Verified
Lithuania
Local time: 12:47
Member (2010)
English to Russian
+ ...
* Jul 7, 2013

tomedes wrote:

The tool is mainly helpful for translators who charge by target word count and up until now had to guess or base their estimation on private experience.


Yes, for that purpose it could be helpful though I personally don't see any reason for charging by target word count except the cases when it is impossible to count words in the source text (e.g. graphics or PDF files) but in those cases this tool won't help...

Nikita Kobrin


 
Wolfgang Jörissen
Wolfgang Jörissen  Identity Verified
Belize
Dutch to German
+ ...
Could be nice but does not work Jul 7, 2013

Could indeed be a nice tool to use as a help when calculating a word rate in a language combination that produces higher wordcounts in the target language (PL-DE mostly works out this way for me). But a simple query for 3k words NL-DE was rejected (insufficient data, but all required fields were filled). So you probably still have some homework to do.

 
Emma Goldsmith
Emma Goldsmith  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 11:47
Member (2004)
Spanish to English
Other word equivalence tools Jul 7, 2013

A cloud-sourced tool has the drawback that a certain language may have very little input, making it too subjective to be reliable. Also, we're not told how many contributions have gone into any one language pair so it's hard to know whether the result is reliable or not.

AMTrad offers a very similar tool but it's based on the EU corpora (so it's obviously limited to EU languages only). It has options such as using per line / per word figures.

Kevin Lossner talked about
... See more
A cloud-sourced tool has the drawback that a certain language may have very little input, making it too subjective to be reliable. Also, we're not told how many contributions have gone into any one language pair so it's hard to know whether the result is reliable or not.

AMTrad offers a very similar tool but it's based on the EU corpora (so it's obviously limited to EU languages only). It has options such as using per line / per word figures.

Kevin Lossner talked about it here: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2013/07/fee-wizard-for-calculating-equivalent.html

Out of interest, I tested both tools for the ES>EN combination (for which most people would agree there is a 10% difference).
AMTrad reported the equivalent of 10.1% more words in Spanish
Tomedes reported 5.0%
Collapse


 
Tomedes
Tomedes
United States
Local time: 02:47
Member (1970)
French to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Insufficient data is your opportunity to contribute Jul 7, 2013

Wolfgang Jörissen wrote:

Could indeed be a nice tool to use as a help when calculating a word rate in a language combination that produces higher wordcounts in the target language (PL-DE mostly works out this way for me). But a simple query for 3k words NL-DE was rejected (insufficient data, but all required fields were filled). So you probably still have some homework to do.


Insufficient data means the system still doesn't have enough information on the requested language pair and therefore can't provide an accurate assessment.
The tool is quite new, only 2 weeks on the air, and so this can definitely happen.
In that point the user is very welcome to enter data from his own experience ("help everybody") in order to help the next translator.


 
Tomedes
Tomedes
United States
Local time: 02:47
Member (1970)
French to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
You raised some good points Jul 7, 2013

Emma Goldsmith wrote:

A cloud-sourced tool has the drawback that a certain language may have very little input, making it too subjective to be reliable. Also, we're not told how many contributions have gone into any one language pair so it's hard to know whether the result is reliable or not.

AMTrad offers a very similar tool but it's based on the EU corpora (so it's obviously limited to EU languages only). It has options such as using per line / per word figures.

Kevin Lossner talked about it here: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2013/07/fee-wizard-for-calculating-equivalent.html

Out of interest, I tested both tools for the ES>EN combination (for which most people would agree there is a 10% difference).
AMTrad reported the equivalent of 10.1% more words in Spanish
Tomedes reported 5.0%





The tool you suggested is definitely interesting. Our intention was and still is, to create a tool that will be able to assist as many translators as possible.
As I mentioned, the tool is still quite new but new data is entered by translators every single day and so I'm sure you will be able to see added language pairs and more accurate results for the languages you need very soon.
Seems like you have a lot of experience, I'll be happy to see you add some data yourself!


 
Alina - Maria Chiteala
Alina - Maria Chiteala  Identity Verified
Romania
Local time: 12:47
Member (2011)
English to Romanian
+ ...
I cannot understand Jul 8, 2013

How in EN can be 1000 words and only 977 in Romanian. Based on what calculation?
The EN-RO translation usually expands by 10% if not more, it does not shrink.


 
Tony M
Tony M
France
Local time: 11:47
Member
French to English
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER
Not in FR Jul 8, 2013

Alina - Maria Chiteala wrote:

The EN-RO translation usually expands by 10% if not more, it does not shrink.


I don't think one can be so sure, at least, as far as my normal source language FR is concerned. I once had to do the exercise for a customer to work out the real factors over a number of documents.

FR is usually longer than EN, so I woprk on a rule of thumb EN = –10% compared to FR.

However, over a number fo documents, I found ratios varying from +7 to –15%; you could have knocked me down with a feather when I found a small number of EN documents actually longer than the FR ones!

So I think our rule-of-thumb approach may well break down with certain specific documents.


 


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