| User | Thread poster: Solomon Wright Word-count for chinese |
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Solomon Wright 
Germany
Local time: 12:44
  Member (2006)
Portuguese to English
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I have a document in Chinese, to be set as part of a translation exercise. I need to prune it so that it is roughly equivalent to a 1000 word English document; as I have no knowledge of the Chinese language or writing system, my only way of doing this is by using MS Word's wordcounting tool. Can anyone tell me roughly how many characters (as counted by Word) would equate to a 1000 word text in English?
Or put more simply, when you translate from Chinese to English, what is the ratio of Chinese characters to English words (again, as counted by Word just in case the figure varies - I haven't a clue...)
Many thanks
Solomon
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Abbatrans
United States
Local time: 03:44
| | Ratio Chinese characters to one English word | Oct 26, 2006 |
This is a really interesting question, and I would love to hear about other translators' practices and experiences.
I have recently come across the same problem when quoting to a client. At the time being I went from the basis of 2.5 characters per word. The somewhat coarse and arbitrary logic behind it: A large proportion of Chinese words (but by far not all!!!) are made up of two characters. "To be on the safe side" I added 0.5 character.
Drawback: Sometimes the word are made up of more characters. Sometimes there are single character words. Sometimes 2 or 4 Chinese characters express what we have to say in half to a full sentence.
Is there a common practice out there?
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Fan Gao
China
Local time: 19:44
English to Chinese
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| | Our method... | Oct 26, 2006 |
Hi,
I would also be interested in hearing other Chinese translator's methods of calculating the ratio:)
I don't think there is an exact science that can be used in every case because it really does depend on the subject material. Especially for technical or chemical translations where, for just one English word there could be as many as 8+ characters.
That would make an interesting competition. Who can find the most Chinese characters that represent one English word:)
The method we use that generally works out close enough, most of the time is to assume that there are 25% less English words than Chinese characters.
Therefore for a 1,000 word English text, making the calculation on the Chinese character side, there would be about 1,325 Chinese characters.
Hope this helps.
Best wishes,
Mark
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Denyce Seow
Singapore
Local time: 19:44
Member (2004)
Chinese to English
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The ratio I work with is 1.5 Chinese characters to 1 English word. I actually know of people who work with 1.2:1.
Chinese Concept said:
That would make an interesting competition. Who can find the most Chinese characters that represent one English word. |
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Interesting! Let's start a forum topic on this. I'm interested to find out too...
Denyce
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Fan Gao
China
Local time: 19:44
English to Chinese
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Denyce Seow wrote:
Interesting! Let's start a forum topic on this. I'm interested to find out too...
Denyce |
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Great idea, done:) Here's the link:
http://www.proz.com/topic/58368
Mark
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anistone
Australia
Local time: 19:44
Chinese to English
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| | Normal practice | Nov 1, 2006 |
here in a translation agency in China:
1.35:1~1.8:1
Usually, we take 1.5:1
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Solomon Wright
Germany
Local time: 12:44
Member (2006)
Portuguese to English
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TOPIC STARTER |
Thank you for all the help everyone!
S
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lefoque
United States
Local time: 06:44
French to English
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| | Word-count for Chinese | Nov 1, 2006 |
I'm not sure what many Chinese translators do but I know of at least one Japanese translator that charges per character whether or not the word is made up of one character or more. Perhaps that is a good baseline.
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The translation workplace 
