counting words

Hi yall,

How is it going? I would like to know your opinion about some subject. It is about counting the words in a document that has to be translated to Spanish. I assume many of you have so far quite some experience in this field and I am wondering if the following case also ever happend to you.

I got a first project from an translation agency to translate 3 juridical documents to Spanish.So far it seems quite ok but the strange thing is that the the documents were sent to me through e-mail in a pdf file. I was told that I have to count the words in the original documents (source language lets say) manually. I can't use my count-programs as the pdf files are scans. That means I can't do a copy-paste either.

The words to be translated do exceed the thousand words. I know there are thousand words involved according to the word office program that has counted so far the translated words to Spanish. Counting the words one by one on the original document seems to me time consuming.

Am I supposed to count them all manually one by one?

Is this a normal procedure?

Thanks for any advice or opinion on this.
Cheers.

You need an OCR converter in order to convert your scanned PDF file into an editable MS Word file. I use "Abby Fine Reader" and I recommend it.

Hope it helps!

I had the same doubt. Where can I find a sample of that kind of program?
Also, some time ago I had the same problem with a file I was translating which was a power point file and I could not find the same tool as we have in word to count the words. I hope it doesn´t sound silly!:confused:

Thanks so much. I am looking for that program on the net but all I find is free trials. Do you know a site where I can download that abby finereader for free?

All pages I have found so far do only offer a temporary free trial of 30 days and after that it will be useless unless I purchase the product.

Thanks again for the sugestion.

Hi Precepto, ABBYY is a paid program, you can't download it for free from anywhere, unless it's the demo. I suggest you use the demo if you are in a rush and need it!
I don't know any OCR soft that is shareware or free :(

Ooooh, wait!

I do know this website that converts PDFs to Word!!
But there's a restriction, the PDF has to be generated from Word or other editable format, it won't work if the PDF is a photocopy.

http://www.convertpdftoword.net/

You can get free OCR Software here:
http://download.cnet.com/FreeOCR/300...html?tag=mncol

You can get free PDF editing software here:
http://download.cnet.com/PDFill-PDF-...html?tag=mncol

As far as word count goes you can get a great estimate using Adobe Reader word counter, Adobe does a really great job of knowing what is text and what is not, it may not be 100% but it will be darn close.

Hope this helps.

You can copy and paste out of the pdf, this site has a free word counter on it: http://spanishtarget.com/

I am sure that there are other sites that do as well you will just have to look for them.

Export the pdf file to word and count them.