There are many questions on Chinese character count, so we decided to answer them in this post. If you are an experienced translator or copywriter and know a lot about the Chinese character count, we would be delighted to hear about your experience and approaches to Chinese character counting in this post’s comments. In the meantime, here are the answers we’ve gathered for you.
Why is there no Chinese word count?
Chinese is a character-based language and is not the only reason why nobody does the Chinese word count. The Chinese word count’s main difficulty is that a text may contain not only a word consisting of several Chinese characters but also a sentence or a phrase that consists of several Chinese characters not separated by spaces.
Thus, given the current technology development level, only a person who understands the context and meaning of a text could determine where a word is and where it is a sentence. Although who knows, maybe in the future, computers will surprise us. But for now, it is customary to use the Chinese character count.
How many Chinese characters are in 1000 words of English text?
Based on the experience of translators who deal with English-Chinese or Chinese-English translation, there are the following estimations.
An English text of 1000 words, when translated into Chinese, will be 1300-1800 characters long. A 1000-character Chinese text translated into English would contain 650-750 words. This data is approximate, but it can guide you.
How to get a Chinese character count?
You can count Chinese characters for free by using the AnyCount word counter trial version.