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Technical forums » Déjà Vu support »
Word count DVX2 and Wordfast
Thread poster: Irene Acler
Irene Acler
Irene Acler  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 05:46
Spanish to Italian
+ ...
Apr 24, 2012

Hello again

I counted the words of a document with DVX2 and then with Wordfast: the result is quite different!! How's that possible?

Thanks for your help!
 
Victor Dewsbery
Victor Dewsbery  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 05:46
German to English
+ ...
Guesswork Apr 24, 2012

Hi Irene,

You omit lots of useful information - for example which program counts more words, how great the difference is, what sort of source document it is, whether there is any peculiar feature in the source document, whether the same thing happens for other documents, whether you have tried counting the file in Word and what results you obtained, etc.

Because of this, you leave me guessing. A couple of guesswork ideas:

- Recently you asked about the impo... See more
Hi Irene,

You omit lots of useful information - for example which program counts more words, how great the difference is, what sort of source document it is, whether there is any peculiar feature in the source document, whether the same thing happens for other documents, whether you have tried counting the file in Word and what results you obtained, etc.

Because of this, you leave me guessing. A couple of guesswork ideas:

- Recently you asked about the import of a file which included what you called "cells" and "tables". If they were in fact text fields, this makes counting complicated. In some documents I have seen, word was blind to these fields and did not count them at all, but earlier versions of DVX counted them double. I don't know whether that is still true.

- Counting in Word sometimes misses text in headers and footers, and possibly footnotes. In DVX2 I believe it counts what it imports. I don't know what Wordfast does.

- If the document has an automatic table of contents, that too makes counting complicated.

- Number handling is different in different programs - some miss them out entirely, others count them.

- DVX2 offers two counting styles. Do they give different results?

If you would like to try counting a selection of files with your various problems and then telling us the actual results, it may be possible to be more specific. ▲ Collapse
 
Irene Acler
Irene Acler  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 05:46
Spanish to Italian
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Right Apr 24, 2012

I have a Word document (it's not the document I talked about in my previous posts, it's another document), I open it with Word 2003.

It has a number of tables inside: these tables are created directly in the Word document.

I counted the words of the document in the MS Word and I get 4917 words.

I counted with Wordfast and I get:
2563 new words
2088 ripetitions
for a total of 4651 words

And with DVX2 I get:
1) fist counti... See more
I have a Word document (it's not the document I talked about in my previous posts, it's another document), I open it with Word 2003.

It has a number of tables inside: these tables are created directly in the Word document.

I counted the words of the document in the MS Word and I get 4917 words.

I counted with Wordfast and I get:
2563 new words
2088 ripetitions
for a total of 4651 words

And with DVX2 I get:
1) fist counting style (DVX)
3457 new words
1025 repetitions
for a total of 4482 words

2) second counting style (as a Word document):
3540 new words
1258 repetitions
for a total of 4798 words.

I'm quite confused becase there's not coincidence with any of these methods. ▲ Collapse
 
Victor Dewsbery
Victor Dewsbery  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 05:46
German to English
+ ...
Good and informative figures Apr 24, 2012

Your statistics are a good introduction to the complexity of the matter. As far as I am aware, there is no easy answer to the different word counts, and it has been discussed in various blogs, forums etc. For example:

http://www.proz.com/forum/money_matters/80086-whats_a_word_when_quoting.html
... See more
Your statistics are a good introduction to the complexity of the matter. As far as I am aware, there is no easy answer to the different word counts, and it has been discussed in various blogs, forums etc. For example:

http://www.proz.com/forum/money_matters/80086-whats_a_word_when_quoting.html
http://translationmusings.com/2008/06/18/word-count-issues-part-ii/
http://www.wintranslation.com/articles/translation-articles/translation-word-counts/
http://www.proz.com/forum/software_applications/58714-whats_the_best_word_count_software_to_use.html
http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/translation/articles/Getting-a-word-count-for-Translations-from-MSWord%20Word.pdf

And there are various tools that can be used to count projects. Here are a couple of information pages:
http://www.practiline.com/
http://www.globalrendering.com/download.html
http://www.translation3000.com/Translators_Software/WordCount_Software.html
http://word-count.alienpicks.com/

For my own work, I usually use the statistics feature in Word, but sometimes I calculate my fees by using PractiCount, and occasionally I use the DVX2 count. Although I hardly ever count the WORDS - I usually bill by the line (of 55 keystrokes). But that is another issue - if you want to check it out, you can look at:
http://www.proz.com/forum/prozcom:_translator_coop/58318-translation_rate_conversion_tool.html#442998
http://www.proz.com/forum/money_matters/36413-rates_per_character_line.html#259767 ▲ Collapse
 


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