Forum: Japanese / 日本語
Topic: Character counting methods
Poster: AjaniO
This is my first post here, so hopefully I'm doing this correctly...
In any case, I have been working with a new agency (Japanese to English) for most of this year and recently I have noticed that their character count is significantly different from the counts that I get in Word or Trados.
The first time I noticed this, they said that they use their own software to produce a character count because Word often includes single-byte characters. Their software was specially formulated to count only double-byte characters, etc., so they had confidence that their count was correct.
I edited the document they gave me and removed all alphanumeric characters to see if I could get anywhere near their count. When I did this, I found that there was still a significant difference in the character count and at best, their count may have been closer to a word count rather than a character count.
I sent the edited document along with an analysis file from Trados and they replied in compliance with my count.
Recently, I received another assignment from them and after the last time, I made sure to check the character count. It turns out that there was a discrepancy of about 1000 characters without editing, and after manually removing all the non-Japanese text that I could find, the discrepancy was still about 500 characters.
I brought this to their attention with the same evidence as before and now they are not bending. They told me that their software is correct and basically explained to me that their software counts only characters that fall under the unique code assigned to Japanese text in Word and unfortunately they cannot provide me with proof via screenshot because their software is proprietary.
I read on another blog that this character count issue is a problem for this company and I have never had this issue with other companies (this is the first non-Japanese/American company that I have worked for).
Has anyone else had this issue before? Is this normal? Any advice to offer?
Topic: Character counting methods
Poster: AjaniO
This is my first post here, so hopefully I'm doing this correctly...
In any case, I have been working with a new agency (Japanese to English) for most of this year and recently I have noticed that their character count is significantly different from the counts that I get in Word or Trados.
The first time I noticed this, they said that they use their own software to produce a character count because Word often includes single-byte characters. Their software was specially formulated to count only double-byte characters, etc., so they had confidence that their count was correct.
I edited the document they gave me and removed all alphanumeric characters to see if I could get anywhere near their count. When I did this, I found that there was still a significant difference in the character count and at best, their count may have been closer to a word count rather than a character count.
I sent the edited document along with an analysis file from Trados and they replied in compliance with my count.
Recently, I received another assignment from them and after the last time, I made sure to check the character count. It turns out that there was a discrepancy of about 1000 characters without editing, and after manually removing all the non-Japanese text that I could find, the discrepancy was still about 500 characters.
I brought this to their attention with the same evidence as before and now they are not bending. They told me that their software is correct and basically explained to me that their software counts only characters that fall under the unique code assigned to Japanese text in Word and unfortunately they cannot provide me with proof via screenshot because their software is proprietary.
I read on another blog that this character count issue is a problem for this company and I have never had this issue with other companies (this is the first non-Japanese/American company that I have worked for).
Has anyone else had this issue before? Is this normal? Any advice to offer?