Lunch over IP: On the relative length of languages
Bruno Giussani on the relative length of languages when translated. He points to an online translation forum that carried this nugget:
- Spanish document: 25%-30% longer than the English source.
- Finnish document: about 30% shorter than the English source.
- Russian document: about 30% shorter than the English source (same for Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian)
- From German into Finnish the character count decreases by 10% and the word count by 40%.
- From German into Russian: about one-third more.
- From German into English: about one-third shorter.
- From Georgian into English: about 45-50% more.
- From English into Estonian: about 30% fewer words.
- French is 15-25% longer than English.