Forum: CAT Tools Technical Help
Topic:"Unique" words
Poster: Samuel Murray
Post title: @Anastasia
[quote]anastasiawhite wrote:
I just received a 5,000 word project and they said that 2,000 of those words are unique. What does that mean? Should I only charge for the 2,000 unique words? [/quote]
What it means depends on whether the client took into account TM matching and internal fuzzy matching when calculating the "unique" words. But regardless of whether he has or hasn't, the "unique" words is a word count that attempts to reflect what is the word count of segments that contain non-repeating text.
[i]In other words, in the text "The cat sat on the mat. The dog sat on the mat. The cat sat on the mat.", there are 18 words in total, but 12 "unique" words. The words in the third sentence is "non-unique" because it is a repetition of the first sentence, and all the words in the first and second sentence are counted as "unique" because those are the first or only occurrence of those sentences.
If we take internal fuzzy matching into account (i.e. if we take into account that the second sentence is very similar to the first sentence), then the "unique" word count would be even lower (as low as 7 or 8, in fact).[/i]
Whether to charge for all words or only "unique" words is up to you. You should charge a rate that reflects how long it will take you to do the job. You should try to get a hold of the source files and do your own word count on it. If you use special tools that help improve your translation speed, then you should take that into account as well.
If a client gives you a "unique" word count, he probably assumes that you will be using a CAT tool that will enable you to translate repeating or semi-repeating segments faster than non-repeating segments, and he is probably hoping that you will charge him less for repeating and semi-repeating segments. However, you should only charge less if you will in fact spend less time on those segments. If you're not using a tool that allows you to do that, or if the subject matter or language combination makes this unreasonable, you should not offer discounted rates for such segments unless you really want to.
