Good point. From an analysis of parallel UN documents, it seems that character counts are about 10% higher in Spanish/French/Russian than English. The same do

Good point. From an analysis of parallel UN documents, it seems that character counts are about 10% higher in Spanish/French/Russian than English. The same documents are translated to Chinese with about 1/4 the total characters. My instinct is that character count is a pretty good approximation of size for European languages, but a big adjustment would need to be made for some Asian languages where a character is more like a syllable in european languages. http://www.uncorpora.org/Rafalovitch_Dale_MT_Summit_2009.pdf http://www.uncorpora.org/Rafalovitch_Dale_MT_Summit_2009.pdf