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English is a wordy language!
Wednesday 1 December 2021, by
We have compared the word-counts of the 503 translations into English from other languages on our site [1] with the following results:
– ALL OF THE TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH OF RUSSIAN AND GERMAN TEXTS HAVE WITHOUT EXCEPTION SIGNIFICANTLY MORE WORDS THAN THE ORIGINAL
The detailed lists of the texts involved in this study can be seen below.
There is a real possibility that the very act of translating high-quality literary texts such as those involved here necessarily entails a certain necessary supplement of words in the target language to properly convey the subtlety and finesses of the finest authors, although we have seen that that was not the case in a non-insignificant percentage (17%) of the translations into English from Guy de Maupassant, as fine a writer as ever was.
However allowing even a 5% error of margin, so to speak, that nevertheless leaves both the German and Russian languages well out in front in terms of literary power and impact per word, we do believe.
And of course the phenomenally compact Latin of Caesar’s Commentaries, probably the most compact language in the history of mankind [2], leads the field as can be seen in the summary above.
Thus our conclusion as per the title of this study:
WHEN IT COMES TO LITERATURE, ENGLISH IS A SIGNIFICANTLY WORDIER LANGUAGE THAN GERMAN AND RUSSIAN (AND LATIN OF COURSE)
GERMAN TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH
RUSSIAN TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH
FRENCH TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH
[1] the above counts don’t include the following works:
– Xenophon’s Anabasis, written in ancient Greek (95,000 words in English);
– B. Traven’s 130,000-word English translation of his own novel The Death Ship, somewhat modified from the original 90,000-word German text.
[2] exemplified by Caesar’s celebrated “veni, vidi vici!" for “I came, I saw, I conquered!”