Yulia Kovalskaya 

Here's the answer from asking the very tool you're using :-)  Perhaps that helps to explain somewhat?

Tokens and cost estimation in GPT models

This confusion is quite common — token counts rarely align neatly with word or character counts. Here’s what’s happening:

1. What tokens actually are
   Tokens are not characters or words. They are chunks of text that represent how the model processes language. On average:

   • 1 token ≈ 4 characters in English text, or

   • 1 token ≈ ¾ of a word.

   However, this varies depending on the language, punctuation, spacing, and formatting. For example, “don’t” counts as two tokens (don + ’t), and numbers, markup, or special characters can multiply token counts quickly.

2. Why your count seems inflated
   If your text had ~2,500 words or ~14,000 characters, 36,000–37,000 tokens does sound high — but likely includes prompt and system text automatically sent with your request.
   Many interfaces (such as translation tools or connectors) send extra metadata or instructions under the hood, often tripling or quadrupling the visible text length. That means what you see as “input” is only part of what the model actually receives.

3. Input vs. output
   OpenAI charges separately for input (your prompt) and output (the model’s response).
   If you see 5× more input than output, it usually means your application sends a large prompt (context, settings, memory, translation pairs, etc.) each time. You can check this in your developer console or logs if available.

4. Terminology and multi-translation features
   Yes, those would increase input tokens further, since they expand the prompt with additional instructions or examples.

5. Estimating cost
   For GPT-3.5-Turbo, you can approximate:

   • 1,000 tokens ≈ 750 words (roughly).

   • To estimate cost, divide total tokens by 1,000 and multiply by the model’s rate.

   Example: 37,000 tokens × $0.0005 (input) ≈ $0.0185 for that request.

6. Practical takeaway
   You can’t directly map tokens to visible characters because the model processes much more than what’s displayed. The only reliable measure is the token count shown in your OpenAI usage dashboard.

Dear Paul!

Thank you, very useful for general understanding of the issue. 

Paul said:

If your text had ~2,500 words or ~14,000 characters, 36,000–37,000 tokens does sound high — but likely includes prompt and system text automatically sent with your request.

As for this, I have not modified the promp...in that case, it was the general one "default translation". So, yes, it does have some descriptive text, but not that long (or maybe it does not depend on the text length directly..)

Paul said:

Many interfaces (such as translation tools or connectors) send extra metadata or instructions under the hood,

Under translation tools you mean Studio itself, right? But then:

Paul said:

If you see 5× more input than output, it usually means your application sends a large prompt (context, settings, memory, translation pairs, etc.) each time

Settings??? You mean the general Studio settings? 

Memory??? You refer to the translation memory?? It is not supposed to "participate" in the process.

As for point 4: if I indicate to apply the terminology database, will the plugin process and count ALL the terms available in it?

Paul said:

The only reliable measure is the token count shown in your OpenAI usage dashboard.

Exactly, but that can be consulted only a posteriori:). 

Thank you for your explanations, always very useful, Paul!

Best wishes!

Yulia Kovalskaya 

I guess the best way to see what is being used would be use a tool like Fiddler.  If you do that you'll be able to see exactly what gets sent with every call, and also what gets sent back.  Then you can spend time analysing with your data to  understand it better.

I don't know if it's free anymore, but this should be helpful:

05 What is Fiddler and how to use it

The article is in the dev community so you might need to request access first if you can't see it:

 Trados Studio Developers 

Depending on the plugin settings, segments may be sent multiple times; however, I assume that option is not enabled. I suspect the discrepancy is mainly caused by the wrapper prompt the plugin includes with each segment, which is normal for API calls (in contrast to chats).

Yulia Kovalskaya 

You inspired me to look closer at this being able to see the tokens question... you're not the only one asking.  Perhaps this is worth a look: https://multifarious.filkin.com/2025/11/11/trados-ai-monitor/

 Paul Many thanks, I will check it out more deeply the coming days (being a bit short on time right now). I'll give you more feedback in the coming days but I love your approach as described in your blog!

Yeah, we can now achieve things with coding LLMs and coding agents which seem unbelievable. And in a fraction of time.

Because as an avid LLM user I felt too restricted in Trados, I built a whole personal local Laravel/Statamic/PHP-App which let me export the bilingual files, extract the XM, put that in a database segment by segment with some meta data, wrap all that in my own prompt engineering, far exceeding any possible options within.the AI plugin itself and send that in chunks to whatever LLM or provider I like, put it back into the XML, and re-import to Trados.

It is not a hundred percent production-ripe but works for me. :-) It gives me better results as far as I can only export termbases to my app and incorporate it, as well as any other instructions and project information (I usually translate IT books and need it to know more about the general subject).

It would be better of course If I could work on the Trados files itself, but that seemed too difficult.

(BTW, my own book about prompting and a lot of tricks around it is due on December 11 here in Germany as my first own IT book since the mid-90's, being published by O'Reilly Germany. No prompt collection of course, but teaching helpful knwoledge about LLMs, prompting and some tools and peripheral things.)

May I ask which AI coding tools you used?

Paul After installing the monitor, I looked for the "AI" option to add the proxy server but couldn't find it in Trados Studio 2024 Freelance via File -> Options. Is it supposed to work with the Freelance edition?

 Jens Olaf Koch 

It should work with any version. But you’re looking for a non-existent option. What makes you think there is one?

On the coding tool… mostly Claude but I dip into others depending on the context of the problem I’m trying to solve.

Paul Your app makes me think there is one:



I'm not familiar with proxy servers, I must admit ...

 Jens Olaf Koch 

Right! Something I forgot to remove!  That’s only text. I stopped reading it and forgot to remove the original approach.

The proxy server starts once you start monitoring.