Unlike the very precise language used in legal texts, our blogs use more general, everyday language. So, the letters that appear most frequently in a respective language will also affect how much space is needed in the layout! Example 2: colloquial textįor this second example, let’s take a look at the intercontact blog. Some letters require less space (like l), while others need more (e.g. Now, none of this is really important until you realise that your translated text no longer fits in the intended layout. In our example, the Spanish and French texts are approximately 20% longer than the English equivalent. That’s why a piece translated from English into Spanish or French usually expands in length. Overall, the text length in the English translation is also the shortest, while texts in the romance languages Italian, French and Spanish are the longest. In terms of word count, English is in the middle range of our comparison languages and contains the shortest words with an average total of 5.364 letters. The individual words in our sample text are in fact quite short compared to the other languages, with an average total of 5.462 to 5.675 letters. In contrast, Italian, French and Spanish use more words to express a meaning. Italian, French and Spanish: more words, fewer letters The text uses fewer words compared to the other languages but these words contain a relatively high number of letters. Other languages, such as Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Malaysian, Swahili and Basque, for example, share no relation to Finnish or Hungarian yet still belong to the agglutinating languages.Īs the table shows, although German is not an agglutinating language, it also follows the same pattern as Finnish and Hungarian. Hungarian and Finnish are related, as they are both Uralic languages and belong to the Finno-Ugric language group. Hungarian is comparable to Finnish as it is also an agglutinating language. Other words, such as verbs, are modified with the help of affixes, which means that extra letters can be added to a word depending on the subject, tense and case. Instead, the respective words change according to the case. In this family group, parts of the language are strung together to form more complex words.įor example, there are no prepositions before nouns in agglutinating languages. That’s because Finnish is an agglutinating language, which comes from the Latin word agglutinare, 'to glue together'. Languageįinnish and Hungarian: fewer words, more lettersįrom the table, we can see that Finnish gets the content across with the least amount of words but with the longest word length, averaging 7.899 letters. With translations, the original source language also plays a role. The following table serves only as an example, as there may be differences depending on the type of text. It's unclear whether the text was written in one language and then translated or if the texts were simultaneously written in the different respective languages. The piece was published in several European languages, making it ideal for a comparison. Our first sample text deals with legal copy from the field of economics. A comparison of European languages Example 1: legal text Read more to find out just how much the length of a text can vary in different languages. Why do translations come back longer than the original and exceed the layout? We decided to get to the bottom of the matter and help make your layout problems a thing of the past.Ĭomparing two sample texts in several different languages, we’ll illustrate why the same content in Spanish, for example, requires a lot more space than English. Which languages are longest and have the most words?
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