Localization Academy

Adjusted Word Count

Does translating fuzzy matches require the same effort as translating no matches? How do we know the actual translation effort for localization projects? Find out how adjusted word counts consolidate the data from analysis to come up with a number that represents the actual translation effort.


What are adjusted or weighted word counts? And why do we do them?

To understand this one, I suggest you go check out the video where I explained what is the analysis, because we’re going to build on that. At the end of the analysis, the result of the analysis is that you get a word count log or analysis log, which tells you how many 100% matches there are, how many repetitions, how many fuzzy matches, how many no matches, and so on there are in your project files.

I’m going to say that this is A, B, C, D. So these are different numbers. So at the end of the analysis, we get a bunch of numbers. But, what is the actual real translation effort? We don’t know about it because all these different categories, they require different efforts. 100% matches, repetitions, they’re pretty fast to translate or review. And, it’s definitely not the same way as translating no matches.

So we apply certain discount, let’s say, for 100% matches we apply by 10% and we apply this discounts to all these categories, so that in the end, we get just one final number. And, we can easily work with this number and this number, this is the adjusted weighted word counts. This basically represents what is the real translation effort of this project. So one number represents the translation effort. So it takes to translate this whole thing distributed into these different various categories. It takes the same time and same effort, as if you were translating this amount of no matches. And that is the purpose of adjusted word counts.

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