English Is the Best Language in the World
"that's the reason why Spanish texts are longer"
Only sometimes...
Amiguito- one word
Little male friend- three words
The pronuntiation of English is also crazy, the pronuntiation of Latin languages is logic:
Language-"lenwich"
Lengua-"lengua"
Finally, English is only 4th most spoken language in the World (mother tongue speakers), after Chinese, Hindi and Spanish. Arabic will be 4th in the near future, and English 5th...
A MORE ORIGINAL NAME: "Only sometimes...
Amiguito- one word
Little male friend- three words"
You apparently didn't read my post in its entirety.
Get yourself a book that has been translated into Spanish, and compare it with the English version. You'll notice that invariably the Spanish version is pages longer.
A book consists of many thousands of words, not just three or four as in your example.
<<Get yourself a book that has been translated into Spanish, and compare it with the English version. You'll notice that invariably the Spanish version is pages longer.
>>
What about a book that has been translated from Spanish into English?
How about sending us another armada to crush?
"What about a book that has been translated from Spanish into English?"
That would do quite nicely, too, but for some reason that seems to be rare.
"How about sending us another armada to crush?"
Perhaps you are speaking about the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. I remember you the defeat of the English Armada in 1589, during the English-Spanish War (1585-1604). The campaign resulted in defeat and eventually to a withdrawal with heavy losses both in lives and ships.
Guest: Hmm. That's interesting.
Spanish-to-English translations get very little press. I suspect that it has something to do with English being a dominant global language.
Guest, you may have a valid point: the target language translation might necessarily be longer than the original text in books that are meant to be read for pleasure. (A good analogy might be computer products; ported applications always seem to be inferior to the original.)
I'm going to try an experiment. I have quite a few service manuals in my house, translated into quite a few different languages. Since service manuals aren't intended to be "art", merely informative, I am working on the theory that their translations will probably be literal, and for the purpose of this debate, accurate.
I'm going to look at all of them and get back to you. If I'm wrong, I'll be the first one to admit it; I've always felt that stubbornness on any issue is a direct barrier to learning.
GUEST: I did the research that I promised. The results were interesting.
Quite a few of the manuals seemed to have the exact same number of pages, whether they were written in English, French, or Spanish. Differences in the way the text was formatted could have produced this result, so I realized that I was going to have to actually count the words, a not-too-fun task.
This results of this tedious task revealed that while the Spanish translations were somewhat longer, they were not a lot longer—5% longer would probably be an accurate guess. For example, a given paragraph might be 19 words in English, and 21 in Spanish.
So I stand corrected to an extent.
Thanks for your research . One thing I would like to add is that one should consider what kind of text we are talking about in order to compare the degree of concission of different languages.As for technical documents it's normal that English texts are shorter than their Spanish translations because compound names abound, and English follows the Germanic fashion of putting one name after another whereas in Spanish a preposition is almost always used between both. For example : "computer graphics" vs "gráficos POR computador" . Of course there are exceptions : can opener vs abrelatas . Anyways English is not exessively concise for a Germanic language. For example,take a multilingual user manual and compare the German and English versions, hehe.
Do you remember losing all your naval power and influence along with your crappy spick ships?
Spain and England WERE the most powerful countries on Earth:
Spain was the most powerful country from XV-XVII, during 3 centuries.
England was the most powerful country from 1815 to 1890s, when the German Empire was more powerful (75 years).
Yes. We can speak about the lost Empires. But both, the British and the Spaniard...
<<Do you remember losing all your naval power and influence along with your crappy spick ships?
>>
Spain did not lose all her naval power, according to my books the defeat of the Spanish Armada took place in the XVI century, and the Spanish Empire reached its peak in the XVIII century . The failure of the Spanish Armada provoked that Spain would no longer be the supreme world superpower , but still she was far from losing "all the naval power". According to the historicians, Spanish ships were too big and difficult to maneuver in seas like the North Sea for which they were not conceived but they did well in the Mediterranean (defeat of the Ottoman Empire). Your ignorance is as big as your mouth, what about reading a bit?.
So the spanish empire did not go into a decline after the defeat of the armada? sure? you might want to re-check that one, little man.
The fact is that England remains centre-stage whereas spain is now a place for budget tourists to drink and vomit.
<<England remains centre-stage>>
What! Are you joking? England is a hole of the worst kind!
Even if it has some resemblance of centre-stage, it is only because of America. You may be the serf of the richest man in the lands, but you're still a serf!
Also the fact that you must be one of the very few patriotic English people is another reflection of what a poor nation you inhabit.