Expansion of Languages when you translate from English

Thinking about how your document will look in English is what most of our customers think about.  But there is more when you are translating your documents.  Specifically expansion and contraction of your text when translated.

For example, when translating into a romance language such as French or Spanish, text can expand as much as 20%. Other languages such as Dutch and German tend to use longer words than English and can expand as well. This can present formatting and desktop publishing challenges if not planned well. For example, a table in English that fits nicely on one page may spill over to the next page if translated into Korean.  I have provided approximate expansion or contraction rates below when translating from English into the following languages:

Language % Difference

Arabic                                         104

Chinese                                        61

Czech                                         117

Dutch                                         128

Finnish                                       103

French                                        111

German                                       108

Hindi                                            83

Hungarian                                   113

Italian                                         109

Japanese                                    115

Korean                                        123

Portuguese                                 110

Russian                                       115

Spanish                                       117

Swedish                                        95

Keep this in mind when formatting your English – don’t squeeze all of your text into a cramped space with tiny font as this will cause issues for your translation projects.