DAVOUD RASTGOU wrote:
Do you do a wordcount when translating legal documents, or do you use a one-off price for each type of document? For example, property purchase document.
I don't do this type of translation, but from what I recall from chats with colleagues, standard forms that contain the exact same information except for the person's individual responses tend to be charged per page or per document. If you translate many of these, you may even have a template (i.e. a previous translation) that you can re-use and simply fill in the person's individual information. But even if there is no template -- if the document is mostly a form or something like a certificate or diploma, translators often charge a flat fee for the entire translation. However, documents that contain unique text (i.e. longer documents, including divorce decrees, antenuptial agreements, wills & testaments, trust founding documents, and possibly also property purchase documents) are charged per word.
By the way, what is best tool for the conversion of images to a Word file where the words could be counted?
That would be an OCR program ("optical character recognition"), and there are a few of those (free and paid), but OCR programs work best if the source text looks very clean and tidy... and my experience with legal texts is that the source files often look very bad, so you won't be able to do a reliable word count, even with OCR software.
The latest version of Microsoft Word has built-in OCR. Simply drag and drop the PDF file onto the Word window (e.g. onto the ribbon). You can see how Microsoft Word's OCR compares to that of Abbyy FineReader and one online system, here.
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