New Word Counting Update: Full Credit for Every Segment, Clearer Progress for Every Team

Smartcat will soon introduce a fairer way of counting words in your projects. It’s a change designed to give teams a clearer, more accurate picture of project progress, and to make sure every contributor is recognized for every piece of work they complete.

With the change, any segment with content counts as at least one word — one Smartword — even when it's made up entirely of numbers, codes, dates, or phone numbers.

Previously, these number-only segments weren't counted in the word total. With this update, every segment counts, and progress tracking now reflects the full scope of the work being done. This will be useful for thin product catalogs, pricing tables, or AEM content full of SKUs and dates.

This also means you may see a small increase in Smartwords consumption in new projects. Number-only segments that are inserted from translation memory, copied from the source, or repeated now each use one Smartword, whereas before they used none.

• Crystal-clear progress tracking. Your project status now mirrors exactly what's been confirmed, segment by segment, so when a project shows complete, it's complete, with nothing left behind.
• Fairer recognition for linguists and reviewers. Work on numeric and code-heavy segments that linguists confirm now counts toward their statistics and payments, just like any other segment.
• More complete quality averages. Translation Quality Score averages for documents and projects now include number- and code-only segments, which were previously left out.
• Built for data-rich content. Teams working with catalogs, structured tables, and AEM content get an accurate experience.

This upgrade is rolling out soon and will apply automatically to new projects as it reaches each organization workspace. Projects already in flight keep their existing counting method from start to finish, even if new documents are added later. Copies of existing projects, and projects created from an existing one, keep the counting method of their source project. Nothing changes retroactively, and your in-progress stats, word counts, and payments stay perfectly consistent.

Learn more in the Help Center article on “Understanding Smartwords”.