| Páginas sobre el tema: [1 2] > |
Rates per character Autor de la hebra: Karen Vincent-Jones (X)
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Karen Vincent-Jones (X) 
Reino Unido
Local time: 17:21
francés al inglés
+ ...
I have been asked to provide a quote for a Portuguese translation based on 1,000 characters with spaces. The total number of characters including spaces is 300,000.
I have no idea how to do this as I have always charged per word.
Can anyone help with this?
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ATIL KAYHAN
Turquía
Local time: 19:21
Miembro 2007
turco al inglés
+ ...
What is the total number of words in the same document?
What is your per word rate?
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Karen Vincent-Jones (X)
Reino Unido
Local time: 17:21
francés al inglés
+ ...
PERSONA QUE INICIÓ LA HEBRA | I only have the number of characters | Apr 2, 2014 |
If I knew how many words there were in the document I would have no problem, but unfortunately I have not yet seen it, and I only have the total number of characters. Is there an accepted equivalence between characters and words? i.e. does 1,000 characters come out at 'x' number of words?
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| Characters per word | Apr 2, 2014 |
I don´t know if there´s a universal average correspondence between amount of characters and words (there probably is), but just as an example, I have a Word file which is 50,340 characters and 8,904 words. This amounts to an average of 5,65 characters per word, which makes sense to me.
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ATIL KAYHAN
Turquía
Local time: 19:21
Miembro 2007
turco al inglés
+ ...
| Rates Dilemna | Apr 2, 2014 |
I am strongly pro-word rather than pro-character. I always give my rate as per word. Therefore, I do not support per character rate at all. When a company asks me for my per character rate, I give them my per word rate instead. As you can see, I am trying to promote per word rate the best I can, and this is what I can recommend. Even ProZ gives per word rates (Community Rates). By the way, I do not know of any conversion between words and characters.
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| I agree with Atil. | Apr 2, 2014 |
But why don't you just ask the client how many words it is? They're presumably interested in the total price, not how you arrive at it. And if you try to guess the wordcount of such a large job, you risk miscalculating and getting your fingers burned.
[Edited at 2014-04-02 18:03 GMT]
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Karen Vincent-Jones (X)
Reino Unido
Local time: 17:21
francés al inglés
+ ...
PERSONA QUE INICIÓ LA HEBRA | Word rate unknown | Apr 2, 2014 |
Unfortunately the client does not know the word rate (yes, I find this hard to believe too) Though as the language in question is Portuguese, basing a quote on characters might be to my advantage, as Portuguese words tend to be longer than English words. Having said that, Portuguese tends to use ten words when three would be quite sufficient.
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Karen Vincent-Jones (X)
Reino Unido
Local time: 17:21
francés al inglés
+ ...
PERSONA QUE INICIÓ LA HEBRA | Division gives 2 separate results | Apr 2, 2014 |
I have tried using a sample of text of and dividing the number of characters by the number of words, but I get 2 different results depending on which calculator I use- either 6.448 or 6.551 I don't understand this, so I don't know which I should use as a basis.
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Henry Hinds
Estados Unidos
Local time: 10:21
inglés al español
+ ...
In Memoriam
From what I gather you have not even seen the text to be translated. It is not a good idea to quote any job until you have seen it in its entirety.
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Andriy Bublikov
Ucrania
Local time: 19:21
francés al ruso
+ ...
Moderador de este foro | Here is the formula | Apr 2, 2014 |
Karen Vincent-Jones wrote:
Unfortunately the client does not know the word rate (yes, I find this hard to believe too) Though as the language in question is Portuguese, basing a quote on characters might be to my advantage, as Portuguese words tend to be longer than English words. Having said that, Portuguese tends to use ten words when three would be quite sufficient.
Hi Karen,
No problem with calculating.
Here is the formula: 1 page ≈ 250 words = 1800 with spaces.
Page count: 300,000 /1800 = 166 pages.
Word count: 166 pages X 250 words = 41500 words.
So 300,000 characters with spaces = 41500 words.
I agree with Henry.
“It is not a good idea to quote any job until you have seen it in its entirety.”
Good luck
[Edited at 2014-04-02 18:41 GMT]
[Edited at 2014-04-02 18:41 GMT]
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Karen Vincent-Jones (X)
Reino Unido
Local time: 17:21
francés al inglés
+ ...
PERSONA QUE INICIÓ LA HEBRA | Thank you Andriy! | Apr 2, 2014 |
That is helpful, Andriy! And yes, thank you for the warning Henry. In fact I have now asked the client to send me a sample of the document.
And thank you to everyone who has taken the trouble to reply.
I hope I can render similar service myself in the future.
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A question for Andriy: how do we calculate amount of characters without spaces versus word or page? What's for formula for that?
[Edited at 2014-04-02 19:48 GMT]
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felicij
Local time: 18:21
alemán al esloveno
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| Like Andriy said... | Apr 2, 2014 |
...only in Slovenian we use the next formula:
1500 chracters (without spaces, which equals 1800 chars with spaces) = 25 lines (for some German clients) = 250 words = 1 page.
So if the client says I have 17 pages to translate, the amount of chars without spaces is 17 x 1500 = 25500 = 4250 words = 425 lines.
Simple math...
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EvaVer (X)
Local time: 18:21
checo al francés
+ ...
| The characters/words ratio depends on the language! | Apr 3, 2014 |
I have calculated words/normalized page on several samples for all languages that concern me, and the figures for English and French were much higher than 250 - 281 and 289 respectively. I found figures around 250 for languages with no articles or post-positive articles ("stuck" to the word, thus not increasing the number of words) - Czech, Bulgarian and Romanian.
[Edited at 2014-04-03 08:47 GMT]
[Edited at 2014-04-03 08:47 GMT]
[Edited at 2014-04-03 08:47 GMT]
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| Ask for the text | Apr 4, 2014 |
I agree with Henry. Tell them to send you the text and count the words. How hard can that be?
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