German is a significantly more compact language than English!

We have compared the word-counts of the 91 translations of German stories into English on our site – 929,000 words in the original texts – with the result that:

– NONE OF THE 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 inherently a significantly more compact language than its English cousin!

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