It may appear that your profession is not word counter. Not really? Then I guess you can be misled by some of the word count-related terms. So I place here several basic ones:
Word count itself
‘The word count is the number of words in a document or passage of text”, says Wikipedia. I wouldn’t dare to argue, but would add that word count is often used instead of text count.
Word limit
Is often used by editors to define the length of the desired text.
Source word count
As translators are usually charged per source word, a source word count is needed to know the number of words in the source text. If a translator can’t count words in a source text (i.e. hard copies), the payment is set by the target word count.
Target word count -
the number of words in a translated document.
Hope it wasn’t too many terms for 1 post. But I’m still wondering about all the “footers, headers, notes, footnotes, end notes, text boxes, shapes, embedded and linked documents, comments and hidden text”. Are you?
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