Is English more compact than other languages?

[Torsten]

There seem to be a lot of very short words in the English language. For example, there are lots of words that contain only three or four letters. If you compare English to your native language or any other language you know, do you think that English is a rather compact language? I mean, if you translate a text from English into another language, is the translation longer, shorter or about the same size?
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Test Of English for International Communication
TOEIC Preparation & TOEIC Vocabulary

[Haihao]

I think Chinese is the most compact. BTW, coincident or not, many or more than many 'dirty words' in English happen to be four letters.

[Jamie (K)]

[Timtak]

Translating into Japanese takes up less space on the page, since there are more, more meaningful, more complex letters, but the Japanese translation may require more phonemes.

[Haihao]

O Jamie, you surprized me! "Wo zai kan." = I at read (I'm at reading), really same thing! Others apply too well too, don't they? "He's a-running," = ta zai pao. "That kid's a-screaming," = ta zai jiao.

However, I'd like to try to translate your longer phrase into shorter Chinese. Let's see:

"a boy on a table" -> nanhai zai zhuo shang. OMG, longer. I lose this one.
"a man and a woman under an airplane" -> yinan yinv zai feiji xia. Hot dog! I don't lose this one.

[Haihao]

BTW, I am also impressed with what Jamie said as "English would use separate words". I have been thinking of it for a long time whether it's a feature of modern English to use verb + particle rather than combination words, such as 'stand by' rather than 'bystand', which I suspect used to be the word because we still have the word 'bystander'. Except a few words like 'understand', English has taken apart long combination word into independent single words so as to become a language excellent in spatial description with so many and so free a combination of verb + particle.

Just FYI, 200 English words would be translated into 400 Japanese characters on average whereas only about 300 Chinese characters are needed to do the same thing.

[Ralf]

[Lost_Soul]

[Yankee]

[Jamie (K)]

"I am going to kill you." =>
"I'm going to kill you." =>
"I'm gonna kill you." =>
"Ah monna kill you." (dialect) =>
"Ah mo kill you." (dialect) =>
"Ah ma kill you." (dialect) =>

"I'm a-workin'," "He's a-runnin'," "They're a-dancin'," etc., come from a construction from hundreds of years ago, in which a present continuous form was made like this: be + at + gerund

So, originally the sentences would have been, "I am at working," "He is at running," "They are at dancing," etc. The "at" got shortened to a schwa, and in this form it survives in a lot of rural dialects both in the UK and the US, and especially in southern US dialects, many of which have forms left over from Middle English or even before.

[Lost_Soul]

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Thanks a lot