another point about French, contrary to the previous one

But after mentioning a few posts ago that the larger vocabulary of English might lead to a greater tendency toward wordiness in English than in French, I remembered a very surprising fact of which I was informed by PUF before starting this project…

French translations of English sentences supposedly tend to be 5% longer than the English originals!

This came as a great surprise to me and everyone else who heard it. It had practical ramifications, too… Namely, I have to write a book 5% shorter than the available money would seem to allow, because the translator is paid by the length of the French translation, not the length of the English original. (Strange system to me, and to most Anglophones, I know.)

The question is whether that really means that French (counterintuitively) uses longer sentences than English. My suspicion is that it’s an artifact of translation as such. In other words, I suspect that an English translation of a French text would also be 5% longer than the original.

Having translated three whole books myself, I can see why this might happen across the board… Any author is going to be taking advantage of certain economical wording tricks that work only in her/his language and are difficult to render with equal economy in one’s own. Over the course of an entire book, that could easily add up to 5% of additional length.