Ram Viswanadha wrote:
There is also some information at http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/docs/papers/binary_ordered_compression_for_unicode.html#Test_Results
Not sure if this is what you are looking for.
thanks. not really. I am not look into the ratio caused by encoding. But rather the ratio caused by language itself. For example, in order to communicate the idea "I want to eat chicken for dinner tonight", French, German using the same encoding may use different number of characters to communicate the same "IDEA".
"Efficency" here is dependent on the translation and varies widely. (See example below.) That's why the practical experience of professional translators will probably provide the best answer. I have already mentioned what is, in my experience, the range for contemporary Japanese-English and Chinese-English.
These ratios are important to JE and CE translators because we usually get paid by the English word. But it usually takes more work to use less words. So, if we don't want to be penalized for using concise English, we try to charge by the character count in the Chinese or Japanese source text. To quote a rate to our clients, we must calculate what the "efficiency ratio" -- to coin a term here -- is for our translations in this particular field.
If you want to calculate this ratio yourself, I agree with your idea of using Bible translations, although the number of proper names may skew the results compared, for example, to technical translations. But it woud be a good place to start.
One example, from thousands, found on yesterday's honyaku ML:
イメージ合成写真です --> 'simlulated photograph' or 'the photograph shown is for illustration only" , i.e., from 21 to 45 characters in English, the target language. Decide how many bytes you're going use to encode the Japanese and the English strings here, and you'll get the "efficiency ratio" in this case.
Jon
-- Jon Babcock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
