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Counting ASCII characters
Thread poster: Diana Kokoszka
Diana Kokoszka
Diana Kokoszka
United States
Local time: 00:00
Polish to English
+ ...
Jan 10, 2016

Hi,

I would really appreciate your help with counting ASCII characters. I am supposed to submit a test translation of a user interface with limited ASCII characters.

1. 20 ASCII characters allowed in this case:

LIKES_0 polubienia, DISLIKES niepolubienia

2. 80 ASCII characters allowed in this case:

Przesuń kciukiem od lewej do prawej krawędzi, aby uzyskać dostęp do Szybkiego sterowania (Quick Controls) i ukryć pasek aplikacji i... See more
Hi,

I would really appreciate your help with counting ASCII characters. I am supposed to submit a test translation of a user interface with limited ASCII characters.

1. 20 ASCII characters allowed in this case:

LIKES_0 polubienia, DISLIKES niepolubienia

2. 80 ASCII characters allowed in this case:

Przesuń kciukiem od lewej do prawej krawędzi, aby uzyskać dostęp do Szybkiego sterowania (Quick Controls) i ukryć pasek aplikacji i pasek adresu

How can I check the numer of ASCII characters in my text?

Diana ▲ Collapse
 
Sergei Leshchinsky
Sergei Leshchinsky  Identity Verified
Ukraine
Local time: 07:00
Member (2008)
English to Russian
+ ...
any Jan 10, 2016

CAT-tool tells the number of characters in the active segment. Work in a CAT-tool.
 
Diana Kokoszka
Diana Kokoszka
United States
Local time: 00:00
Polish to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
MemoQ Jan 10, 2016

Hello Sergei,

I opened the file in MemoQ, but I am not sure where I can find the number.
 
Erik Freitag
Erik Freitag  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 06:00
Member (2006)
Dutch to German
+ ...
ASCII Jan 10, 2016

Do you really mean ASCII? The ASCII character set does not include characters with diacritics.

So in your example, these characters would not be allowed (and possibly not be displayed correctly, or even at all): ń, ę, ć.

[Edited at 2016-01-10 20:53 GMT]
 
Diana Kokoszka
Diana Kokoszka
United States
Local time: 00:00
Polish to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Erik Jan 10, 2016

That is what the instruction says:
Summary for lab quick controls feature [Maximum translation length=80 ASCII characters].

I see what you mean but I am quite confused now about how to proceed.
Thank you for your help anyway.

[Edited at 2016-01-10 20:44 GMT]
 
Erik Freitag
Erik Freitag  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 06:00
Member (2006)
Dutch to German
+ ...
Ask your client Jan 10, 2016

wegrzyndiana wrote:

That is what the instruction says:
Summary for lab quick controls feature [Maximum translation length=80 ASCII characters].

I see what you mean but I am quite confused now about how to proceed.
Thank you for your help anyway.

[Edited at 2016-01-10 20:44 GMT]


You should ask your client whether they really mean ASCII. I doubt they do. Probably they just mean "80 characters".

If you're working in Word, you can highlight the sentence you want to check and use the word count feature (which also shows the number of characters with and without spaces).

Your example consists of 123 characters without spaces and 144 including spaces.

If they really do mean ASCII (which may make sense if the text is supposed to be shown on very simple display elements), you will have to find a way to avoid diacritics. I have no idea what the usual practice in Polish would be to achieve this.

HTH,
Erik



[Edited at 2016-01-10 20:59 GMT]
 
Axel Kirch
Axel Kirch
Taiwan
Local time: 12:00
Chinese to German
+ ...
Check former Polish encoding standards to replace ASCII Jan 11, 2016

Erik Freitag wrote:

You should ask your client whether they really mean ASCII. I doubt they do. Probably they just mean "80 characters".

Yes, probably they refer to printable Latin-based characters in general (starting from ASCII code point 32), including those the extended ASCII character set (beginning at code point 128) which includes characters with diacritics used in many languages based on the Latin alphabet. The space character counts as one character (ASCII 32), by the way.
The fact they mention ASCII at all is that the interface is probably not fitted to take differently encoded characters (such as VISCII, a similarly outdated encoding for the Latin-based Vietnamese character set, or the newer global standard Unicode which includes non-Latin-based character sets like Chinese and Korean).


If they really do mean ASCII (which may make sense if the text is supposed to be shown on very simple display elements), you will have to find a way to avoid diacritics. I have no idea what the usual practice in Polish would be to achieve this.


[Edited at 2016-01-10 20:59 GMT]


Check if there's a modified version of ASCII for Polish (like VSCII for Vietnamese) or another former ISO encoding standard used in Poland prior to the advent of Unicode and ask the contractor if they can adapt their software accordingly.
 
Diana Kokoszka
Diana Kokoszka
United States
Local time: 00:00
Polish to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Moontan Jan 11, 2016

Thank you so much for your help.
 


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Counting ASCII characters







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