beth (defunct)

French is 15-20% longer than English, which is an issue when you are e.g. producing bilingual signage or documentation (hashtag Canadian problems) and trying to have the French and English come out approximately the same length. They used to solve for this by reducing the font size of the French but that is no longer considered politically correct.

#canadian problems #makes me glad i'm just a copy editor and not a translator

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in reply to @bethposting's post:

#1 MIKE DAWSON FAN @gansmaltz3/7/2024, 12:49 AM

what are you talking about? vowels are the worst letters

salem ΘΔ @indoorcoyote3/7/2024, 4:07 AM

/smɔlbɑ͡i̯ndə(r)klɪps/ vs /pɛ̃snɔtdəp(ə)tifɔʁma/... fourteen or fifteen phonemes for english vs sixteen or seventeen for french. pretty close. though english definitely wins in number of syllables

in reply to @ur-gothmom's post:

evie @ewie3/7/2024, 4:54 PM

it’s a problem in web design too! i cannot count the number of times i’ve read articles saying “make sure your web design can adapt to when the text is up to 150% its length and down to 75% of its length” or something like that. turns out not accounting for translation is just a common problem

Sarah 🪶 F1330 @silverspots3/7/2024, 5:15 PM

English is one of the more efficient languages, in terms of syllables to information ratio. They did a study that compared talking speeds of people in a bunch of different languages and found that even though the number of syllables per second varied greatly, the amount of information per second was nearly constant across nearly all languages