tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post7176874647583290489..comments2024-03-06T02:46:19.929+00:00Comments on Translation Tribulations: Games agencies play, part 2: "word counts"Kevin Lossnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14727800526216764023noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-24957257996622442502016-04-03T11:41:42.714+01:002016-04-03T11:41:42.714+01:00All joking aside, what did you mean when you wrote...All joking aside, what did you mean when you wrote "I have heard some silly skirts tell me that they are aware of the problem ..."? Just noticed it after reading the anonymous post. I'm not usually very into all that PC stuff myself, but was a little puzzled by it.Michael Beijerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12826804655385764008noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-41545189786818067222015-12-21T14:58:32.369+00:002015-12-21T14:58:32.369+00:00The prejudice you exhibit here is appalling! The a...The prejudice you exhibit here is appalling! The assumption that skirts are associated only with female employees is completely out of touch with modern, gender-fluid thinking. <br />Although my blog is noted as a bastion of misogyny, I do try to include enough other causes for offense in my writing that all should have equal reason not to read it. This sort of sociolinguistic booby-trapping ensures that only the most intrepid adventurers reach the hidden treasure ;-)Kevin Lossnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14727800526216764023noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-13839992381675957942015-12-18T18:35:13.091+00:002015-12-18T18:35:13.091+00:00"Silly skirt" is a phrase I haven't ..."Silly skirt" is a phrase I haven't seen before. It appears to be directly putting down female employees, doubting their intelligence and referencing them as objects. It seems quite rude, which is too bad because it turns people off from reading your writing in the future.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-24284383645175341092014-12-17T14:52:29.042+00:002014-12-17T14:52:29.042+00:00I doubt there is any attempt to deceive there. Thi...I doubt there is any attempt to deceive there. This is the problem we all face: there is no real standard for arriving at these counts, yet some hair-splitters will argue for an hour to save 3 euros due to tool count differences rather than deal with the business transaction at a higher, more sensible level. People who know better still get caught in the stupid trap of thinking about these services as commodities like palettes full of toilet paper or pork bellies sold on the Chicago futures markets. This is why it's often better to deal with flat rate quotations after assessing all relevant parameters. Everyone needs to get beyond the sausage shop mindset of the festering bulk market bog and behave like people with services of value to offer who focus on the service and not what shows up after the decimal separator on the quotation or invoice.Kevin Lossnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14727800526216764023noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-32568687487149905412014-12-17T14:25:54.452+00:002014-12-17T14:25:54.452+00:00Well, a recent client did the wordcount in Wordfas...Well, a recent client did the wordcount in Wordfast (he did not tell me that) and I did the job in Trados (he told me to use any CAT tool). The difference was 1100 words (22+%).<br />However, I made a Wordfast analysis myself (with Wordfast online) and - surprise! - the difference is round 1000 words.<br />Is this a con artist?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-90241307858551020492014-10-31T21:21:39.475+00:002014-10-31T21:21:39.475+00:00I've noticed that memoQ seems to differ much f...I've noticed that memoQ seems to differ much from Trados in its analyses, even up to 15%.Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewiczhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08918639829529412108noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-31521557161711727682013-10-19T22:56:36.178+01:002013-10-19T22:56:36.178+01:00Thank you, Shai! I didn't realize that Paul ha...Thank you, Shai! I didn't realize that Paul had also made a blog post with that information; I remember his talk the month before at TM Europe where he presented similar comparisons. Someone else was also kind enough to send me similar data after this post went up, and I'll be sharing it as well after I've had a proper look.Kevin Lossnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14727800526216764023noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-66990687905586243682013-10-19T22:30:33.481+01:002013-10-19T22:30:33.481+01:00Very important article, Kevin.
You touched upon a ...Very important article, Kevin.<br />You touched upon a very important subject and described the complexity of it very nicely, as well as presented yet another mechanism for identifying Language Sausage Providers,<br /><br />Paul FIikin's explanation can be found here http://multifarious.filkin.com/2012/11/13/wordcount/Shaihttp://www.translationtherapy.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-1512185856660149402013-10-13T21:10:54.104+01:002013-10-13T21:10:54.104+01:00István Lengyel wrote quite a nice explanation of t...István Lengyel wrote quite a nice explanation of the different word count behaviors in MS Word, memoQ and some other tools, talking about what constitutes a "word", something that is oddly much in dispute. I wanted to reference it in this post, but although I've used the link several times before, I just couldn't dig it up on the fly. But the problems you and I face with long chemical names are reflected the same way in all the hyphenated expressions one sees in English and German as well. And then of course there are the problems of compound words, where a lot of abuse occurs; that's one reason why I tend to use character counts or just make a reasonable overall estimate of time and effort in a fixed job price and tell a sausage-maker who wants that broken down into words to do the division and expect that number to change from job to job. <br /><br />I'll be curious to hear about your approach after the conference next week. Other than searching and replacing hyphens and parentheses or brackets with spaces for counting purposes, I can't imagine what it might be. It would be nice to see some attention paid to optimizing our working tools, but I waited long enough to be able to deal with subscripted variables and empirical formulae without a mess of tags, so I won't hold my breath.Kevin Lossnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14727800526216764023noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-86310552498280684062013-10-13T20:35:22.656+01:002013-10-13T20:35:22.656+01:00Well, you should see the job I did some time ago. ...Well, you should see the job I did some time ago. A chemical patent, full of names like "4-(2-([1,2,4]triazolo[4,3-a]pyridin-3-yl)quinolin-8-yloxy)pyrimidin-2-amine". I've got the job as bunch of TTX files, with initial wordcount of about 50k words. Then, when I already had about 30% translated, the LSP contacted me with a problem - client says, that according to Word, there's only about 37k words, and they won't pay for more.<br />I wonder how many of you know where the difference comes from - I knew and I was able to explain to the agency owner right away. Unfortunately, the end client was a prick and threaten to withdraw a job, if the LSP won't accept the changed wordcount. Fortunately, they were fair - we used the new wordcount as a basis, but the rate was rised, so I've got only about 10% less money than the initial estimate - of course I could refuse and get the money for what I already did from LSP pocket, but it's a good client, so it wasn't worth it.<br /><br />Now, about the difference - the name I quoted above is a single word for Word and almost any CAT tool on the market. Except for Deja Vu and Trados 2007 - it's 7 words for them, if I count correctly. These are still the best tools for chemistry work... unless you know a trick, which I'm going to present at Triconf next week: then you can use any modern tool to effectively translate long chemical names.Wasatyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12415028316778775171noreply@blogger.com