The importance of spaces between words

I have already posted (here and here) that the German courts do not like to count spaces when they pay translators, and one of their arguments is that spaces are not meaningful. As I said, some translators say they will deliver a text without spaces.

Languagehat provides proof of the significance of spaces: no matter how jumbled the letters in a word are, as long as you break them up into words of the same length as the original, it’s fairly easy to follow:

‘Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, …’

One thought on “The importance of spaces between words

  1. Some years ago, having negotiated a source-based per-word rate with their translation agency, Volvo decided it would cut costs by using the search-and-replace function to indiscriminately translate the string “och” (“and”, when the string is not embedded in another word) in all the source texts. Yeesh. Less pay for translating defaced texts.

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