This is not necessarily true - Spanish is one language that has no shortage of translators in NYC.
In most any translation comparison between English and a more latinate language, English will be shorter - this is something I've paid attention to ever since I read, some 35 years ago, in "The Way Things Work - the Book of the Computer" that English is the most efficient language in terms of number of letters. Don't get too nationally prideful though unless you are an Angle or a Saxon or an ancient Norseman. It has a lot to do with verb conjugations adding a few letters to verbs in these languages whereas in English we usually add zero or one letter to conjugate a verb. Also, many of these languages require that a noun have an article: e.g. "el Español" or "un Español" versus "Spanish" or "Spaniard". Another interesting comparison of English to other languages is that, according to the Guinness Book of World Records (and other sources), English has substantially more words than any other language: anywhere from half a million to a million versus fewer than 200,000 for the next most wordy language ( http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JohnnyLing.shtml) . As for the English versus Chinese example, I would note only that Chinese may require more brushstrokes than English. Also, ideograms sacrifice a lot of usability to achieve their density - think alphabetization and phonetics (however approximate this latter is in English). On 12/20/07, Dan Bron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > ... > You know, I once had a similar feeling about English vs Spanish. I am > barely literate in Spanish, but I know enough to read the signs on the > subways. > > And, sometimes having no better option on my commute, that's what I > do. And > what I noticed was that where the English was to the point (more or less), > all the Spanish was more than a mouthful. I don't mean it's difficult to > voice, I mean that the Spanish used a lot more words to get around to the > same idea. > > After a brief and silly moment of national pride, it hit me. The Spanish > wasn't long winded because of an intrinsic feature of the language, it was > long winded because it wasn't Spanish. It was English, crammed into > Spanish. > ... -- Devon McCormick, CFA ^me^ at acm. org is my preferred e-mail
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