German is a significantly more compact language than English!

We have compared the word-counts of the 90 translations from German – just under 900,000 words in the original texts – into English on our site, with the result that:

– NONE OF THE 90 TRANSLATIONS DONE BY MANY DIFFERENT TRANSLATORS HAVE LESS WORDS IN ENGLISH THAN IN THE GERMAN-LANGUAGE ORIGINAL;

– THE ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS HAVE ON AVERAGE 10.3% MORE WORDS THAN THE GERMAN ORIGINALS.

This certainly seems to indicate that German is a significantly more compact language than its English cousin!

The detailed list of the texts involved in this study can be seen below.