From/Into English Translations: Text Expansion/Contraction

Hi!

One of the most recurrent issue a PM has to face is Text Expansion/Contaction.

These two links show tables with percentages of text expansion/contraction for several language pairs (from and into english)
Text Contraction and Expansion in Translation | articles | Translation
Translation Text Expansion: How it affects Design -

I found it very useful when I find myself quoting projects.

One last thing! I knew about diferrent text expansion/contraction rates depending on the language pairs, but did you know this rate changes (quite significatively) within the same language pair, depending on the field (legal, medical, etc...)?

p.s: Such issue one one the biggest issue a DTPer has to face.

Hi nabylm,

It is a big issue. I was astonished the first time I had projects with Finnish and English. The translators had two kinds of rates: one for the source word count and another for the target word count. And the reason is very logical because the contraction or expansion are very high as shown in the tables.

mm, very interesting, it´s useful to have it this way in a table, very handy. Thank you!

Indeed, last week I quoted a project that hadt to go from Norwegian to English, and the from English to Swedish, Finnish and Danish. I applied the rates given by this webpage to get the estimate wordcounts.
I fully recommend all PMs to use it!

Wow.. I didn´t know the percentage of text expansion when translating from Finnish to English was that big. I will definitely print this table. Thanks for sharing!

Great info Nabylm! thanks for sharing. For me it was always difficult to know the expansion when working with traditional chinese into english as well. Cheers.

Thanks Nabyl. As a DTPer this is very useful, I've been looking for this info for some many years

Great forum to discussion. For English translation always go for uscis-certified translation services. Always go for qualitative translation services which are certified in the market and always avoid cheap service providers that are useless for exact translation service.