Flare (top nav) word counts for translation estimates

[RickD]

Hello,

I have a large project (Flare 12 HTML 5 top navigation) for our company’s software, which we are looking to localise for our Italian distributor. The first thing I need to do is get a word count to estimate the cost of this initial translation. I have used the Flare Report to get a word count but would like to know how the word count is calculated. In particular, because this is a single sourced application I want to check that Flare’s word count feature reflects the single source nature of the topics, and how many words would be need to be translated.

Does the word count include snippets – and - only count snippet contents once (not every time it appears in the final output)

Does the word count include title tags, metadata, file names and menu / TOC

Does the word count include image screen tips (per image file property - not every time the single source image appears)

Is there a way to point to a topic’s folder and just get the word counts for all the topics in that directory.

Can the report be exported to a csv so the page counts per topic can be broken down and looked at in more detail.

Many thanks for any feedback provided.
Rick

[GFPetro]

If anyone has an answer to this, I'd love to hear it! We're facing an almost identical situation in my office.

[ajturnersurrey]

I am interested in the answer so I did a bit of digging -it didn't answer the question properly but this is what I learned, based on 1 sample project:

In MadCap Flare you run a Report on Content Files and tick File Word Count. That count on every content file includes all unique text in every topic or snippet. (I observed that hyphenated words count as 1, excludes snippet content and variables, excludes image alt text etc..) So a total based on these is a good first pass estimate of size of translation job.
For my current project I get 54310.

If I run Compute Statistics in Lingo instead, a file which has a word count in Flare of 17 has a word count of 47 in Lingo, because it does include the snippet content and the image alt text etc...
But for the same project it computes overall 52071 unique words from a total of 60307.