How to count words for website translation?

September 29, 2022

Translators and translation agencies are often faced with the problem of preparing a quote for the translation of a website. The text on the website can’t be easily downloaded and imported into CAT software and manually copying the text from the website can be very time-consuming.
For this reason, we have prepared a simple word counting tool in our application. When you scan a website, you will see the word count for a single page and the total word count for all the scanned pages.

Example:

One of the most important factors to consider when using our word counting tool is that the word count includes the text of the entire web page.

What text is included in the word count?

For this example, we’ve scanned one website: https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/exams-and-tests/ielts/

The word counting tool includes:

Text from the top menu:

All the text from the main body of the website:

and all the text from the footer of the website:

We always scan/transfer the text of the whole web page.

Difference between word counting in our tool and other CAT software

During the development process, we constantly test and compare the word count results from our tool and other CAT software. So far, we have found that all CAT software options feature different word counting algorithms. The results may vary. In particular, the analysis depends on the export formats of the web pages. Our word counting tool considers only the raw text of each web page, but most CAT software will count HTML tags as well. If you export text in the HTML or DOCX format from our app to your CAT tool, make sure that your tool removes all HTML tags and that the final analysis is based on raw text without HTML tags.

Future upgrades in our software

Due to great interest of our customers in additional features of the word count algorithm, we are already in the process of upgrading it 😊.

We will add even more detailed text analysis features, such as: number of segments, source characters, source tags, and repetitions in segments. We will also introduce a text preview feature within the word count tool.

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