I'm occasionally contacted by companies wishing to contribute to language packs on behalf of their clients. They want to know the word count for strings in the English language pack to help price up the cost of the translation work. Thus I thought it would be helpful to share translation coordinator Koen's answer to this question:
The total number of strings can be found on the download page http://download.moodle.org/langpack/2.6/. For 2.6, it is very close to 20000 strings, which is an awful lot. That said, there is a difference between a usable language pack and a complete language pack. I estimate that about 40% complete can be usable, providing the right 40% is translated. In Moodle it is not possible to figure out which strings are for administration and which for students, however the doc Translation priority gives a guide.
AMOS does not provide a word count. You could though download the English language pack and ask a PHP developer or Linux scripting guru to write a tool for counting the number of words.
Has anyone else any advice on how to obtain a word count for the English language pack? If so, please reply.