I have the same experience in Portuguese (my native language). Romance languages tend to be more verbose (also anecdotal personal evidence). But, in a way, my feeling is that modern English has substantially more words than Portuguese – which, I suppose, makes sense. English is under a much greater creative pressure due to its wider audience (English as a global language).

Using your example sentence (armchair laboratory):

[0] É quase sempre mais curto em inglês do que em português. [1] It's almost always shorter in English than in Portuguese.

11 vs. 9 words.