length of text by different languages

[Yung-Fong Tang]

I remember there were some study to show although UTF-8 encode each 
Japanese/Chinese characters in 3 bytes, Japanese/Chinese usually use 
LESS characters in writting to communicate information than alphabetic 
base langauges.

Any one can point to me such research? Martin, do you have some paper 
about that ?

I would like to find out the average ration between
English,
Geram,
French,
Japanese,
Chinese,
Korean
in term of the number of characters, and in term of the bytes needed to 
encode in UTF-8

If such research information have not been done, maybe one way to figure 
the result is to take tranlated Bible fo these language from swords 
project, strip out those xml tag and leave the pure text, and measure 
the size. Since all the Bible translation communicate the same 
information and the volumn is huge enough, that could be a good way to 
find out the result. Of course, those mark up need to be taken out to 
reduce the noise.