What Do You Mean by "Words"?

 💬 The word count – it’s a basic principle in the world of translation. Ever since the introduction of #CAT #tools in our industry, pricing – as far as I know in Germany – has moved away from line counts of target texts to word counts of source texts. Fair enough. Otherwise, it would be harder to calculate repetitions.
 
But there is a problem with this system when you are translating from Japanese into other languages. Although LSPs dealing with Asian languages may be aware of it, most end clients in Europe have no idea that …
 
❗ Japanese cannot be counted in words! At least not that easily.
 
Japanese is a so-called agglutinative language, where grammatical functions are determined by suffixes. Accordingly, Japanese texts are written without any empty spaces.
🙅 That makes counting words a challenging task in Japanese.
 
👉 The solution? Character counts are used instead for translations from Japanese into English (or German).
 
🔖 The technical explanation:
Of course, the concept of 語 (a word) also exists in Japanese. The combination of #自立語 (an independent word) and #従属語 (an ancillary word) makes a 文節 (phrase = a minimum unit of meaning). But it is very complicated to count ancillary words. As far as I am aware, there are no programs that can properly count the number of Japanese 語.
 
E.g. 日本語の単語とは何か。
→日本語の　単語とは　何か。 (written in the unit of 文節 [phrases)
→日本語　の　単語　とは　何　か。 (written in the unit of 語 [words])
 
🔎 More on terminology:
The translation industry in Japan usually uses the term ワード (= English “word” transcribed in phonetic characters) rather than 語 (= a Japanese equivalent term for “word”) to refer to words in European languages to avoid any confusion
 
Analogously, I use the term “characters” 字（文字数） (or Zeichen in German) for Japanese and the word “strokes” (Anschläge) for European languages.
 
Some of old veterans of the trade in Japan still base their pricing on the unit of 400 characters. And do you know why?
 
🖋 400 characters is the standard length of text which fits on good old manuscript paper (原稿用紙). Prior to the days of dedicated word processors (ワープロ) and PCs, all writers worked with this paper which looks like an oversized sheet of square paper (see photo above).
 
👌After reading this post, you are now an educated client. You can skip the unnecessary question of the word price when requesting a translation from Japanese into your target language.

#TranslationServiceArai #german #English #japanese  #和文英訳 #和文独訳