number of words

[Sofie]

Yesterday, I had a meeting with the promotors of my paper (my mentors of sorts). I am currently adapting a rather detailed method to describe differences in translations. How detailed? Let's say, I have currently 30 pages of comparison, and I have only done one third of the categories. An enormous work, and I didn't quite realise exactly how detailed it would be. Neither did they, for they were positively stunned to see how many examples I found for each category. Since they want to make a few students adapt the same method for a course method, but they should not have more than 20 pages of comparison (max) they asked me whether I knew, how many words the albums I use contains (Asterix Légionnaire).

And I had no idea!

I am really bad in estimating this, I have consult the word counting programme in the computer for my own essays, but I never typed the entire text of the album out. A long introduction for a simple question? How many words? Did any actually count that? Since all languages have the same space, I would not estimate it to vary enourmously. But still...

And although never typed out the text, I am already quite good at quoting from French, Dutch stranslation one and Dutch translation two, complete with page numbers and the number of the picture on the page. I have no doubt I will know them all by heart when I have finished. As far as I know, only a few members can actually do that :grin: . I was thinking of Jaap and Sellix, maybe a few others. Still, I can only do it for one book....so they remain the experts but just for this one book, I feel I might actually be surpassing them.

Of course, I have consulted analysis on Sellix' dutch asterix site, Jaap did help me not to miss anything, and this will not failed to be mentioned repeatedly throughout my thesis. Asterix is a grateful topic, since many people already examined the albums more closely than any of my examiners will have done. And once I have edited everything I'm working on, I will gladly post it somewhere on the net.

This has become a letter, not a post. I'm sorry for that. Just a little repetition: how many words, any guesses? of course, it wouldn't be surprised if somebody actuall counted them sometime in the past...

Merry Christmas!

Sincerely, Sofie

[shr]

Each page seems to have on average about 130-150 words so I'd guess around the 5-6000 word mark for a whole book.

[invisifan]

Page 1: 65 words on the first page (American) or 70 (British) - should I continue? will take a while ...
Page 2: 119 words on the first page (American) or 115 (British)

[Sofie]

I had an average of the same number for the french version...
My dad has volunteered to actually count them So I'll let you know, but I guess it'll be around 6000 too.

So that means I can tell my promotors around 2000 words should yield approximately 30 pages worth of examples when you use the analysis I use. Which is pretty much. Poor students

[Jochgem]

Actually, the German edition has been retyped by a group of volunteers, and can be queried electronically. I remember I have once seen statistics, but if I remember correctly that involved the number of picture frames in the stories. Not the words.

Volltextsuche: http://www.comedix.de/lexikon/special/v ... /index.php

HJ "Jochgem"