Thread: Thai word count

Hello,
Does someone know how to calculate the word count of a Thai document?

I second that question. Is it like the wordcount for Chinese?

According to what I've read, it's not quite the same. I can't find the ratio of characters that become words. Also, it seems that you have to consider the ratio and that some words can be separated and thus counted as words without the ratio.

Good question danielr. As far as I know, the concept of "Wordcount" for us westeners does not quite exist in languages such as Thai for instance. Indeed, there is no spacing between words, which makes it very delicate to count for a software. What you can do is pretranslate the document, and count the target. Also, you can ask a native to give you an approximate Wordcount, this way you can compare it to the target Wordcount, and maybe get a relation (equation like) between wordcount and character count.
Again, I don't think there's any software capable of giving you an accurate Wordcount for Thai (or Japanese for instance). Here is another point where machines will never be able to replace the human brain!

Thanks, Nabyl. You are right. There is no space and the concept of "word" is very polemical.
The problem this time was that the file was not editable. I just had an image from the client and my brain couldn't count its characters either

I understand. This way I recommend sending it to a native to get an approximate number. However, if the file is very small, and you dont want to loose time (different time zones), comparing target wordcount and characted count seems to be the best option. Did you manage to get a good quality converted file?

That is what I did. The native confirmed the word count the following day. The thing is that the file didn't have a good quality for a conversion.
I also tried to google how to calculate Thai, but I couldn't find a good explanation.

Are you recreating an editable version of the file or translating it directly in Word?

The project has not started, but for 200 words and a plain format, I wanted to translate directly in a Word.

Oh too bad. So you won't be able to get the exact source character count and target wordcount to extract a relation. That would have been useful for future projects. If I get to handle one of these projects, I'll let you know about the "equation" I get.