Text growth when translating

Stendahls wrote:
Is there any one who knows of a accurate table that shows how much a text will grow after transaltion? Ie. how much extra space that should be used when creating a document?

Kirill Semenov wrote:

Dear Daniel,

I think that there are no tables like what you seek. There are just some general stats. And it depends on Source->Target languages and the nature of a text translated. Of course, I may tell you, say, that when you translate from English into Russian the general volume (in raw chars) grows 20-30% in average -- so, even if I do, is this information of any value to you? This all depends. Please specify the Source-Target pairs -- and even in this case you may ask only for broadly averaged evaluations, not for exact ratios.

Stendahls wrote:

Dear Kirill,

Thank you for the reply! What im looking for is some figures that can show the growth between many different languages (as many as possible)and that is a reasnably correct number. I understand that it cant be completly accurate for all texts, all figures on this has to be an average. But I´m looking for numbers that is not "guestimated" but calculated. Evenbetter would be if the gowth would be shown depening of type of text as well.

But the general stats you where talking about would be a good start, du you have a link?

Best regards
Daniel

Victor Potapov wrote:

Dear Stendahls,

There is no straightforward answer to your question. Even in one language pair (English>Russian for me) texts in different areas of knowledge (legal, financial, technical, political etc.) have different "growth" percentages. Examples are all terms that originated in English but were translated descriptively into Russian/other languages. Recent example: L/C in financial English (letter of credit). In Russian it is "àêêðåäèòèâ" - there you go, 3 characters in English - 10 in Russian... Same is true for a lot of other terms as well.

You can never get a "standard" increase in number of characters, maybe a broad range - e.g. I quote 10% to 30% to my clients (I charge by target word). Generally all translations fall into this range, closer to 15-20% though.

And, by the way, the "growth rate" for number of words in source and target texts will be different from the "growth rate" in number of characters! I have no reliable statistical data here.

I agree that this type of statistics (e.g. average verbosity increases in a language pair by subject matter area) will be extremely interesting for translators. If you do compile this table/database - please post a link here at proz.com !

Regards,

Victor.

Victor Potapov wrote:
There is no straightforward answer to your question. Even in one language pair (English>Russian for me) texts in different areas of knowledge (legal, financial, technical, political etc.) have different "growth" percentages. Examples are all terms that originated in English but were translated descriptively into Russian/other languages. Recent example: L/C in financial English (letter of credit). In Russian it is "àêêðåäèòèâ" - there you go, 3 characters in English - 10 in Russian... Same is true for a lot of other terms as well.