For anyone wanting to undertake analysis like this, a fairly common choice of text for comparing languages is the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is translated into a staggering number of languages.
About 10 years ago, I used the translations of KDE texts to estimate how much space texts in a given language could take when translated into another language (we had an internal web page editor that only allowed putting texts and widgets at fixed x-y coordinates, so allocating extra-space for translation was a sad work-around).
http://fabsk.eu/i18n/#en;fr