Dear Yorick
Would morpheme counts not be even more accurate (or
linguistically valid) than counting orthographic characters?
Unfortunately, I don't think anyone has done these yet...
Anyway, I agree that for the moment, character counts
are a useful addition to word counts.
Problems about translation (compensation, explication,
zero translation, etc) obviously apply throughout.
Here are some figures from my own research:
1. FIFA Laws in English, German, Spanish, and French.
French is longest, then Spanish, German, and English.
lines words characters text
726 10216 56874 Laws97GB.txt
724 9173 63402 Laws97DE.txt
1342 11030 63765 Laws97SP.txt
1169 11763 67537 Laws97FR.txt
2. Canadian Hansard in English and French.
French is longer in both samples.
lines words chars text
1569 20336 104015 c1.001.E.A
1569 22413 124457 c1.002.F.A
1120 12260 62421 c2.002.E.A
1120 12135 62622 c2.003.F.A
3. George Orwell's 1984 (thanks to Multext-East and TELRI)
in several languages. These figures were provided by
Dr Tomaz Erjavec (Ljubljana) with various additional caveats:
line word char
English 16053 102787 584803
Bulgarian 11172 85878 536977
Czech 11087 79022 498216
Estonian 17872 78792 545984
Hungarian 8813 79814 575219
Romanian 16684 103704 603868
Slovene 14938 91336 541461
4. Le Monde Diplomatique in English and Fench:
lines words characters text
116 956 6410 LEMAE1.txt
133 941 7457 LEMAF1.txt
5. From research with Dr Maria Cristina Borba (Rio Grande, Brazil).
Alice in Wonderland in English, 2 Brazilian-Portuguese translations
(one for adults, one for children), and a Catalan translation (MARIST).
CARROLL LEITE SEVCENKO MARIST
File length (bytes) 204,288 148,889 150,235 143,055
Running words (tokens) 31,731 25,348 26,245 25,566
Different words (types) 3,417 3,896 3,614 4,400
type/token ratio (mean) 44.99% 51.61% 51.25% 51.19%
ave. word length (letters) 3.63 4.36 4.31 4.16
Best
Ramesh
Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Honorary Research Fellow, University of Birmingham;
Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wolverhampton;
Consultant, Cobuild and Bank of English Corpus, Collins Dictionaries.
On Thu, Apr 25, 2002 at 04:56:15PM +0100, Yorick Wilks wrote:
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>
> Isnt there some (minor) confusion here? If the question really is relative TEXT
> length,
> then nothing to do with word counts will settle it--what matters is character
> counts, since word length
> varies considerably between languages. The table showed 1984 in Estonian as
> having far fewer word
> tokens in it than the English original, but I'd bet theyre much longer
> ones--how about the texts then??
> I have no parallel texts with English and E. European languages but I do with
> the four major W. European ones
> and the English pages are shorter in every case.
> Yorick Wilks
>
>
>
>
>
>
> James L. Fidelholtz" wrote:
>
> > Andrew and Spela:
> > Just a word of caution: studies like Spela's provide interesting
> > and suggestive data, but figures will surely vary, depending on the
> > translator, topic, etc. [all the usual sociolinguistic caveats apply
> > here] (and note Jean's contribution, with varying rates). I was
> > coauthor of a study comparing English and Spanish, which basically tried
> > to get Spanish to fit into the standard readability curves in a fairly
> > simple way. We were only partially successful (the counts were
> > hand-done by yours truly, featuring a variety of types of text,
> > pseudo-randomly sampled, and especially translations from one
> > language to the other, as well as translations from 3rd languages
> > [French & German] into each). To the best of my recollection (I could
> > look up the exact figures if anyone is hot for them), our results for
> > Spanish-English were rather close to Jean's for French (I assume his
> > were on large amounts of text done by computer--if this holds up [not
> > surprising, given the close relationship of French and Spanish], it may
> > indicate that, for this kind of data, not such a huge amount of text is
> > really necessary).
> >
> > On Wed, 24 Apr 2002, spela vintar wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >Hi Andrew,
> > >
> > >for Eastern-European languages you can compare the lengths of Orwell's 1984
> > >and its translations that were collected within the Multext-East project.
> > >The original Multext project (http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/projects/multext/)
> > >should provide the same for English, German, French, Spanish etc., however I
> > >wasn't able to find it on their homepage at first glance...
> > >
> > >Best,
> > >Spela
> > >
> > >http://nl.ijs.si/ME/CD/docs/mte-d21f/node8.html
> > >//////////////
> > >...
> > >Below we give an estimate for the number of words, by language. The
> > >wordcounts were produced by removing the SGML tags from the texts and then
> > >using a 'wc'-like procedure.
> > >
> > > English
> > > 104.302
> > > Romanian
> > > 101.460
> > > Slovene
> > > 91.619
> > > Bulgarian
> > > 87.235
> > > Czech
> > > 80.366
> > > Hungarian
> > > 81.147
> > > Estonian
> > > 79.334
> > >
> > >
> > >Andrew Bredenkamp wrote:
> > >
> > >> Hello everyone,
> > >>
> > >> Does anyone know where I can find a list of relative text length?
> > >>
> > >> Taking one language as an index (100), I would like a list of the (other)
> > >> main European languages - e.g. (made up):
> > >>
> > >> Spanish: 100
> > >> English: 105
> > >> French: 110
> > >> German: 85
> > >>
> > >> ... etc.
> > >>
> > >> Thanks a lot in advance for any help you can give me.
> > >>
> > >> Cheers,
> > >> Andrew
> > >> =========================================
> > >> Andrew Bredenkamp
> > >> acrolinx GmbH
> > >> URL: www.acrolinx.com
> > >>
> > >>
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