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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

Opened the first one and was like "Wow, TLDR the template."

I wonder how dense the actual verbage is, in the original. For example, I know that localization to German from English can be a real pain; as an example, game developers will find UI elements for menus no longer can contain the long words that their old titles translate into.

For anyone that reads Japanese, is this page actually saying a lot, or is the language just taking that long to encode a word/concept?

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Written Japanese does to be a quite a bit more dense than written English, especially if it's heavy in kanji (Chinese symbols), where a single character represents a word or concept and can be several syllables in length when spoken. It's enough of a factor that, back in the 16 bit era when you only had a few MB of storage space to work with, there were several old JRPGs that either needed to have a lot of dialogue cut out in translation to still fit on the cartridge (e.g., Final Fantasy 6), or that were simply never translated at all because it would have been futile to try (e.g., Final Fantasy 5 and Seiken Densetsu 3, according to legend).

However, this page isn't really the best example of that because nearly half the text is actually English loanwords written in katakana (the Japanese syllabary), which is only slightly more dense per character than English, since each character usually represents a consonant and vowel together. So in this case I'd say the Japanese page carries a little more information, but not drastically so. The copy itself is also quite different, though.

As btn said, the Japanese page is "flatter", there's more information directly on the page, things are stated more explicitly, with fewer abbreviated forms and much less stuff hidden behind tabs or links.

In general, however, I think Japanese tends to be a fair bit more information-dense than English for a given amount of space/characters. It can vary greatly, depending, for instance, how polite you're trying to be, how many foreign words you use, etc, but the ideographic core is very, very, dense compared to English.

[A point driven home by trying to write text messages in Japanese versus English... my experience is that it's much harder to cram in what you want to say into the given limits (~160 bytes) in English, despite Japanese characters using multiple bytes each...]

I've never considered the texting issue with limited characters. It must be the same with tweeting in Japanese vs English characters, too.

The interesting thing about Twitter is that the length limit is artificial (as opposed to text messages where I gather it's more a fundamental limitation of some underlying protocol), and it will allow you 140 characters regardless of how many bytes each character uses. So one can actually pack quite a bit into a tweet using CJK languages.

My observation is that English tweets tend to be a single sentence or at most two, maybe with some tags on the end, but Japanese tweets are often complete paragraphs with 4 or more sentences, sometimes more like little mini-essays—and I hear Chinese tweets can border on the epic...

It's difficult to compare the two because they describe different aspects of the product. The English page has testimonials, pricing information, and some miscellaneous FAQ; the Japanese page has comparisons with email and Skype (the FAQ and pricing are on separate pages).

The Japanese page describes the product's features a bit more succinctly, as they forego the tabs (Group Chat/Mobile/Files/Tasks) for a flat layout with a single paragraph describing each.

Japanese is generally more compressed than English. For instance, consider "dragon" vs "龍". The exception is when polite/formal language is being used, in which case it can get more lengthy. Instructions and descriptions would generally use more polite language, where navigational elements would be more pithy.

If I was to offer a theory on why the Japanese tolerate more text, I would say it's related to higher "skimability". It's easier to pick out symbols within a block of text and get a general feel for what's there vs. words in western alphabets. If this is the case, we would also expect Chinese websites to be similar, and I think that's the case.

Or, it could just be a design trend. For instance, usage of the color pink is much more prevalent in Japanese design.

Great insight thank you for sharing!

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