New in WebTranslateIt: Improvements to the character counter

By Edouard on October 11, 2017

We just released a few improvements to how characters are counted on WebTranslateIt.

First of all, we now display a character counter at the bottom of each translation box.

For those of you unfamiliar with this kind of counter (it is quite widespread on translation tools), the number on the left is the amount of characters in the source text and the number on the right is the amount of characters in the target text.

If a lot of text is being typed in the translation box you will notice that the target text character count turns orange. It’s a sign that your translation could be too verbose.

We also revamped how the character counter works on segments including a character limit.

Finally, we also added one project setting to let you choose how you want WebTranslateIt to count characters: by characters or by bytes. By default we count a character as a character (using a grapheme counter).

It means that “A” is 1 character, “🤔” is 1 character and “की” is 1 character.

However, we know that some tools you rely on still count characters using bytes, and some characters are made of several bytes, so for some tools “A” would be 1 character and “🤔” and “की” would be 2 characters.

We hope you will find these improvements useful. Until then, don’t hesitate to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.