Hi folks,

I'm looking for any kind of statistics which show the average word count (or average range of word count) of translation jobs for professional translators (freelance and/or agencies).

An example of this is in: http://accurapid.com/journal/34CAT.htm

Where it is stated "June 2003 to December 2004: During this period I received 175 jobs, with a total word count of 468,878 words"

Taking the several sets of statistics provided in that article (total words per type of TM tool, divided by number of projects conducted with the tool), this results in:

TM tool 1: 4415 per project
TM tool 2: 1701 per project
TM tool 3: 5692 per project

This also gives a general overall figure of 2700 words per project
 

I'm looking for any type of similar statistics.

It would even be good to see if some statistics can be extracted from the TC jobs (total number of declared words of projects divided by number of jobs proposed). Of course, it should only  be estimated on those that have given word count data. Yet that might not be possible as word count is in a free form text description field.

The purpose of seeking this information is that so many statements about the use of translation technologies focus on consistency, standardization, etc and mention the relevance for large projects.   However, what to do when translation jobs are many, and usually of a word count that is not in the 100,000s of words.  This is an important factor when considering translation technologies.

Any other examples of average word count or average word count range?

Jeff