Chinese Character Count vs. English Word Count

Most of time, we quote based on word count of the source document, that is, for English to Chinese translation we count the English words, and for Chinese to English translation we count the original Chinese characters. 

However, some clients feel that they have better control if count in English words all the time. In this case, even for the Chinese to English translation we count the words on the translated English document instead of the original Chinese documents. So what would be the typical ratio between Chinese character count and English word count?

Actually, these is a basic ratio between the English word count and Chinese character count. To our experience, each 1000 Chinese characters will be translated into about 600-700 English words, or each 1000 English words will be translated into about 1500-1700 Chinese characters (depending on the nature of the text).