Words needed per language

Because languages differ so much, the number of words needed to express the same idea varies by language. In broad terms, Romance languages (Spanish, Catalan, French, etc.) take roughly the same space. Other languages (notably English) are typically more compact. This has a direct impact on translation pricing, which is often per-word, and on software localization: Spanish strings, for instance, tend to be longer than their English originals, which may require UI changes or lead to ugly abbreviations if space is tight.

For my own work, I estimate that Spanish uses about 18% more words than English, and that Spanish and French are of similar length on average.

I am not aware of a robust, up-to-date study on cross-language “word density”. The table below adapts George Sadek’s well-known comparison (based on the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). I recalculated the values with Spanish as baseline = 100. Note: the figures refer to characters, not words.

Characters needed to express the same text in different languages

(Spanish = 100)

• German 93

• Arabic 75

• Chinese 52

• Czech 100

• Korean 106

• Spanish 100

• Esperanto 79

• Finnish 89

• French 95

• Greek 110

• Hebrew 71

• Hindi 78

• Dutch 109

• Hungarian 97

• English 85

• Italian 94

• Japanese 98

• Persian 85

• Portuguese 94

• Russian 99

© 2025 Alejandro Moreno Ramos, www.ingenierotraductor.com