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Chinese to English Translation Length?

Unearthly StewUnearthly Stew Registered User regular
edited November 2010 in Help / Advice Forum
As part of a project in translation I'm working on I need to attempt to estimate how long the the finished translation is going to be. The searching I've done so far has only come up with various translation websites for simple phrases, or trying to estimate the length of Chinese babies. It seems to me like a good point to start would be to say that a Chinese character is worth about two words in English (most verbs being to ___, and other phrases being longer.)

Does anyone here have experience with translating? The story I'm working on is 13 pages in simplified characters. My reaction is to call it about 20 pages in English, but I can't really be sure.

Unearthly Stew on

Posts

  • ZoolanderZoolander Registered User regular
    edited November 2010
    My suggestion for an experimental way to do this is to run it through Google translate, put it into Word and then you will know the wordcount and number of pages. If you wanted more precision, you could also then use Google translate to translate and determine the length of multiple documents, then average all your results to get a reasonable estimate. The accuracy of this method depends on how accurate Google translate is.

    Zoolander on
  • pogo mudderpogo mudder Registered User regular
    edited November 2010
    I had a similar problem when i was doing some magazine design work with students in China. There isn't as much of a difference in length as you would think. the differences in sizes that i usually encountered were like 1 1/3 A4 pages in English was like 1 A4 page in Mandarin.

    pogo mudder on
    what a work of art is man, and the most boring choice you can make
  • Unearthly StewUnearthly Stew Registered User regular
    edited November 2010
    That would be a decent experiment, Zoolander, but I'm in the process of translating the story as well, which kind of under minds the entire project. Hopefully after enough experience translating, though, I'll be able to do just look at a work and give a ballpark estimate.

    So I can roughly expect it to be a third longer than it is... I don't think the original is on A4 sized paper, so that may expand it further. If it helps at all, there are approximately 22 characters per line and 25 lines per page. I punched in some numbers with my previous idea of 1:2 (characters to words) and wound up with about 40 pages... That seemed excessive to me. The 1 1/3rd rule seems like it will be more accurate at this point.

    Unearthly Stew on
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