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comparing multiple word documents
Thread poster: mike316
mike316
mike316
Jul 13, 2012

Hello,

I am a freelance translator. Sometimes, people give me multiple documents to translate, but these documents are largely identical. for example, this past week I was supposed to translate 4 legal agreements. Most of the paragraphs were the same, except some things were different. I found it very frustrating trying to compare the documents by hand and figuring out the actual word count (obviously, client shouldn't have to pay 4 times for a paragraph that is the same across all ... See more
Hello,

I am a freelance translator. Sometimes, people give me multiple documents to translate, but these documents are largely identical. for example, this past week I was supposed to translate 4 legal agreements. Most of the paragraphs were the same, except some things were different. I found it very frustrating trying to compare the documents by hand and figuring out the actual word count (obviously, client shouldn't have to pay 4 times for a paragraph that is the same across all documents).
I am wondering if there is a free software that I can plug these documents into and figure out the actual word count. By actual, I mean only things that are not identical should be counted.
I know Trados does this, but I dont have the money to buy it.
Is there any other software that does this? ▲ Collapse
 
Didier Briel
Didier Briel  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 04:58
English to French
+ ...
OmegaT Jul 14, 2012

mike316 wrote:
I am a freelance translator. Sometimes, people give me multiple documents to translate, but these documents are largely identical. for example, this past week I was supposed to translate 4 legal agreements. Most of the paragraphs were the same, except some things were different. I found it very frustrating trying to compare the documents by hand and figuring out the actual word count (obviously, client shouldn't have to pay 4 times for a paragraph that is the same across all documents).
I am wondering if there is a free software that I can plug these documents into and figure out the actual word count. By actual, I mean only things that are not identical should be counted.
I know Trados does this, but I dont have the money to buy it.
Is there any other software that does this?

OmegaT is free software, and gives you that kind of statistics.
http://www.omegat.org

It doesn't load legacy Word documents (*.doc) but it loads the 2007/2010 format (*.docx). Alternatively, you can convert the old Word documents with OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice, which are also free software.

Didier
 
The LT>EN Guy
The LT>EN Guy  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Lithuanian to English
Additionally, Jul 14, 2012

You could also use the 'Compare' function in Word itself to see what the differences are, thus eliminating the possibility of missing something.
 


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