Understanding completion statistics
There are three main views showing the progress of your translations:
Project progress
The overall progress of your project is the total of all locales. Only when every asset is complete in every language will this show 100%.
See first image below.Locale progress
The progress of an individual locale shows further detail about the portions that are translated, untranslated and flagged.
See second image below.Asset progress
From the Management view click the :bar-chart icon: to show the state of an individual asset across every locale.
Overall progress
The following table shows that two translations (of a maximum three) have been entered in French, but one of them is flagged as having an issue (shown in red).
- The progress in French is only 33% because flagged items are not considered "complete".
- The grey remainders of the progress bars are the portions that are not translated at all.
- Clicking a locale's progress bar will drill down for more detail, as follows:
Locale progress
The following table splits the French progress into its various translation states.
- This shows that one untranslated asset corresponds to four words of English.
- It also reveals that the flagged portion is a single translation marked as "Provisional".
Word counts
Word counts in the overall progress view are that of the translated text. To count the corresponding source words, open the locale progress view and note there are two columns: "Word count" (meaning translated text) and "Source words" (meaning words in your default language).
Please note that word counts are approximate and may differ from your own calculations.
What counts as a 'word'?
Word counts are not based on a dictionary, but rather on individual characters that are considered part of words.
For this reason you may find differences between languages. For example: in English "The man" is two words, but in French "L'homme" is counted as one.
"L'homme" is counted as one word by the same token that "It's" and "Jon's" are counted as one word. Loco's algorithm doesn't actually understand the language, so it can't tell which words are abbreviations and which are possessives. It simply treats all apostrophes as non‑breaking punctuation according to ICU word boundary rules.
Loco doesn't count numbers or HTML tags as 'words'. This can produce a lower word count than you might expect in some situations.
Why are my word counts wrong?
You may find that other translation software (or word processors) give different word counts to Loco. These values are likely to be higher, as Loco errs on the side of caution and tries to avoid counting non-words.
Things that may inflate word counts in other software include the counting of numeric values and HTML code. For example: Loco counts only one word in the text "<b>Coffee: £2.50</b>" whereas Google Docs would count five.
We understand that translating this example to "<b>Café: €2,50</b>" requires more cognitive effort than a single word, but arguably less effort than translating a five-word sentence in full. We're open to feedback on how best to count translatable sentences, but in the meantime just be aware of how Loco's counting algorithm works.
If you're calculating financial costs for translations, please treat word counts as only a rough guide of the work involved as we can't be held responsible for your income or expenditure. If you prefer counts to include non-words, then please export translations from Loco and use your preferred software to produce a higher word count.