Keywords within translation
in the age of information technology

Calculation of text volume

Determining the volume of a text is not only essential in the field of translation (submitting quotations, invoicing), but also plays an important part in various stages of processing natural languages (analyses, statistics, comparisons).
However, the unit of calculation applied differs from one region to another: in the Anglo-Saxon world, on the one hand, it is still common practice to calculate text volume by counting words - a method dating back to the days of the typewriter. Alternatively, in German-speaking countries, and to some extent in France, text volume is expressed in the number of characters (or standard lines).
Depending on the morphology of a language, the average word length varies considerably. In German, for example, compound words occur frequently, whereas French is more analytically structured. 1,000 words of one given language do not correspond to the same text volume as 1,000 words of another. In a multilingual environment, therefore, the only viable and truly accurate method of calculation is to determine the number of characters (or standard lines). (see Quant)

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