Rusty estimating skills...

[alexpgp]

Back in the day, learning to estimate word count was part of the basic skill set for folks who got printer's ink under their fingernails in the course of making a living. Heck, for the first half dozen years of my translation career, I got paid on the basis of source word count, which had to be calculated using precisely this skill.

The eye-killing item on the plate for Monday (it had been due today, but I was able to extend the deadline to Monday) cannot be OCRed, but I did estimate the word count for my own nefarious planning purposes.

Yesterday, when I was using OpenOffice for translation, I was finding my estimates to be not all that bad: after three pages, my estimate was starting to lag by a consistent 10%, which is no big deal. Today, after moving the job to MS Word, I find that there's a big, big difference in the way OpenOffice Writer and MS Word do a word count, and to be frank, I prefer Word's method (whatever it may be), because it turns out my estimate is pathetically low (30% at this point).

While this may spell good news for the bank account, it also means that instead of having 7,000 words left for Monday, I am looking at closer to 10,000 words.

This is not going to be one of those loads-of-free-time kinds of weekend. I just hope my eyes don't decide to pop out of my head and choke me.

Cheers...

Comments

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

I was always taught, and I can't for the life of me remember where, that the total word count was the total character count divided by 5. I have no idea where that comes from or how it jibes with Word's count.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Well, to the best of my knowledge, Word basically considers anything with a space on either side to be a word, so that "I love you" and "She has pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis" both contain three words.

Back in the day of telegraph, the cost of messages was based on the length of the message sent. So to save money (and avoid ambiguity) elaborate commercial codes were developed to encode common phrases as words. David Kahn has a pretty good writeup about this in his book The Codebreakers.

The telegraph companies couldn't really prevent people from using codes, but they could dicker over what constituted a "word" (else someone might insist that THESHIPMENTWILLARRIVEFRIDAY is a one-word message). In the end, the five-letter code group became widely used as the standard measure for a word (indeed, up until it ceased to be a requirement for a ham license a little while back, the five-letter measure was used for testing).

Back in high school typing class, I recall being taught that the "average" word was 5 letters long, and if you use this measure, it turns out the typical double-spaced page coming out of a pica typewriter (10 chars to the inch) with 1-inch margins all around contains just about 250 words.

And that count takes account of a big fly in the ointment: spaces. If you count the space that inevitably comes with a word, the "average" word is 6 characters long.

Translators in the US generally get paid by the word. Translators in Europe get paid basically by the character (though the rate may be expressed using some other measure, such as "per line," where a line consists of some standard number of characters).

But your eyes have probably crossed by now, so I'll cut it out.

Cheers...

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

I think you're right - the 5 characters per word I remember probably came from my high school personal typing class. I hadn't tied that to the 5 character code groups, though - it was just a dim memory ;)

Wordiness

[daphnis.livejournal.com]

What a fine large-word example!!! It sounds out ringingly when vocalized, and even seems to make some sense. Have you thought of going into business mining for and selling these wondrous finds (inventions?) on Ebay or someplace similar?

Re: Wordiness

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Well, believe it or not, it's an actual word, describing a disease of the lungs. I filched it from http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.com (which be one word, m'dear!).

Cheers...