more on word/character issues

The allotment I ended up with from the French was 262,500 characters. At some point, probably by empirical tests, I had found an average in my writing of 6.05 characters per word. It was on that basis that I calculated 43,000 words as the approximate length of the book.

Then I was puzzled, this evening, to find that I was averaging only 5.02 characters per word. If that ratio continued, I would actually be able to write a book of 52,000 words rather than 43,000– in other words, two complete additional chapters.

But my version of Word happens to be French, since I bought this laptop in Toulouse. For purposes of comparison, I tried my pages so far on my old version of AppleWorks, and came up with 6.06 characters per word, almost identical to the estimate done in the spring.

A few tests revealed the reason for the difference… AppleWorks counts blank spaces as characters, while the French version of Word does not.

In January I was told by Knox Peden, who is as knowledgeable about French academic practices as any American I know, that the French tend not to count blank spaces when determining the number of characters. And his statement is supported by the numbers given by my French version of Word.

But my publishing contacts with PUF say that blank spaces *do* count when determining translator pay.

However, I will need to double-check on this and ask if they are really really sure. There’s a big difference between 43,000 and 52,000 words.