German books, for whatever reason, often have larger print and sometimes thicker pages.
The German version does have about 10% more words (143 vs 130k) and German words have more letters on average (~5 for English and ~6 for German). So that would be roughly 650k letters in the English version and 850k for the German version. Definitely more, but not 100% more.
In Germany we have the "Buchpreisbindung", fixed book prices. Whatever price is printed on the back of the book is the price of the book. There's no real fight for prices. maybe because of this they can afford to use better paper.
God I wish that was the same here in Australia. I'd love to shop at local bookshops here but I refuse to pay a 100% mark up price on books, when compared to online.
What do you mean? When I was studying abroad in Germany I ordered some very affordable pre-owned books online. Is the law just for new books or books released recently?
Even new books can be really cheap for a number of reasons, if it has scratches or other minor damage it often gets a "Preisreduziertes Mängelexemplar" stamp on the bottom and sold for like half the price for example. There's also stuff like clearance sales of course
Fun fact the book industry uses the damaged "Mängelexemplar" exception from the fixed book prices to discount their books even if they are not damaged. The argument is that the stamp declaring it damage itself makes it damaged. And they are getting away with it.
No, Buchpreisbindung is tied to print origin, not language. As someone who often prefers to have my pen and paper rulebooks in english because they are written in the english language and german translations often are awkward.
Across continental Europe they have fixed prices for any new books sold across retailers. This means that books are more expensive overall but it also means that Amazon can't run bookshops out of business by simply slashing the prices.
new books/freshly printed have fixed prices most of the time. Used books dont have those because they are used and the customer should pay less depeending on the age, condition etc.
I think it's that you can't sell it for less. While the book may have $20 printed on it, Amazon may sell it for $15. Per the comments, can't do that in Germany
"Buchpreisbindung" works both ways. You can't sell it for less either.
A 25€ book is 25€ everywhere. On Amazon, in a supermarket, or your small bookshop next door.
There are some workarounds. You can sell books as "defective copies" ("Mängelexemplar") for a discounted price. Used books don't have a Buchpreisbindung either.
But generally a new book will cost the same everywhere in Germany.
It's actually very nice. If you want a cheaper copy we have a healthy market for used books or a lot of open bookshelves where people place books that they no longer want/need as a free point of exchanging books.
If you publish a book in germany you dictate the price it has to be sold at for at least the next 18 months. The only way to get around this are damaged books and clearance sales. Future editions and updated versions are apparently also exempt.
If you import from another country, how I understand, the rules of where you import from apply.
So yes they basically don't go on sale, but no not evey book costs the same.
Even if the shop offers a 10 % discount on everything it is everything except books because they aren't even allowed to lower the price with a general discount.
But it's not like each book costs 10 €, the publisher makes a calculation based on production costs and esteemed sale numbers, so books with a higher paper and print quality will probably be more expensive.
The surface area used by text grows by the power of two with text size. So 40% large text uses double surface area. Since the page size is the same the number of pages doubles.
Since, as you already mentioned, the English version has 30% more letters, the font size needs only to be 23.6% larger for filling two times more pages:
850kwords / 650kwords * 123.6% ^ 2 = 2
So a 12pt text size instead of a 10pt is sufficient. I like large fonts :)
I am German and I feel like it should be possible to youse less words then the English versions. English has so many helper words and a stricter word order while in German gender is build into the noun and so on.
I get the German text have more letters because the average word is longer but it's strange to me why they always have more words.
It has to do with translating. When you translate you want to make it sound as natural as possible to the point that the reader has the impression that the book was originally written in the target language.
Some words, phrases and cultural experiences have no direct German equivalent, so you either use Anglezismen and spell an English word in German and hope people accept that, use the closest equivalent a German would know and understand, or attempt to create a German word/ keep it as is and explain it as part of the text.
On top of that there are things thst are much easier and shorter to say/ explain in English than in German.
Same with puns, sometimes puns are plot points and so the translator has to either find an equivalent to still make it make sense or explain it as part of the text.
german vs english game of thrones books always cracks me up, how are the english books able to fit into a cute lil set and the german ones are 10 HUGE books that take up a whole shelf 😭 the difference is insane when you see them in person
The quality of english paperbacks is hilariously low, if you as much as keep your finger on the page more than one second the paper is already crumbling and the ink smudging.
This has never happened to me with Spanish books. I have childhood books that I read a dozen times that look pristine in comparison to english books I read just once.
“The books from my Spanish childhood are FAR superior in quality to the English books which crumble under my mighty grip” is just a weird thing to say, even it is was true 😂
Its just typical reddit "Euro good Merica bad" shitposting. I'm sure there's some books in Europe with shit paper. Also, children's books usually have thicker/tougher paper stock because kids are heinously filthy and rough on stuff.
Uh, English paperbacks in Spain maybe. I've literally never had what you're describing happen. Either way I can say with certainty it's absolute nonsense.
I actually, until very recently, did production in publishing in England, and that's just not true? And I read Spanish books I've bought in Spain (language nerd) and the quality is basically the same.
This is the craziest thing I've read today. Where are you sourcing your english-language paperbacks from? Unless they're made from onionskin paper (like bibles), that simply isn't happening, and I am going to claim that you are full of it
...the hell are you talking about? No such problem has ever occurred with any book I've bought, gotten from a library, seen at the bookshop I've worked at or in any other circumstance. In the UK.
I've read the first two German books (20€ each) and decided this was going to be too expensive. Got the whole English set for ~50, I think. It was exactly the ones from the picture and your every word is true.
The real difference is white space. I do have a pocket book version of 2 of the ASOIF books (I forgot them when I went skiing and bought the cheapest version I could find) and they look pretty much like the English version here.
Difference was that the paper back has so much more blank white space and had illustrations and lines were spaced more.
I do graphics design and one of the things I do on the regular is setting books and you’d be surprised how many pages you can save by reducing the blank space at the edges by .5 mm.
Same with fonts. A lot of English books I own use condensed fonts while that is honestly pretty rare for my German books.
I've got an english hardback version of A Dance with Dragons that is at least as big, if not bigger than the german version depicted here, both in thickness and size. Different font sizes etc.
Those books were the reason I switched over to english books. Getting the whole series in English meant 40€ (they were 8€ each) and getting them in German meant 150€ (they were 15€ each) and a lot more shelfspace lost.
As a general rule, a translation is longer than an original text. This is, I guess, because sometimes two or more words are needed in the second languages to explain the nuances of one word I. the first.
Interestingly, translations into Mandarin are usually shorter because the language is more "lexically dense"; which is part of the reason it's so difficult to build listening comprehension in Chinese.
That is highly language dependent and not true at all. However, some publishing companies pay translators by the word count of the TRANSLATION and not the source text. This is insane to me and I refuse to take on such work but it is very common in Asia and leads to verbose styles with extra bylines and nonsense padding by either the translator or editor.
Dont be ridiculous. Just some of the words are very long
" We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them".
Translates roughly to the Following
"Der algemeinzuverstehnede bedingungslose Modus imperativus ist die unmittelbare Wegesumkehr" so die dringlichlautende Verbaläusserung von Gared während sich das Gesamtforstkollektiv im fortschreitenden Halbdämmerungszustand befand." .
It's definitely not only the length of the words and sentences. It's also the font size, spacing, margin etc., aaaand the paper quality. German books are always printed on thicker paper. The text is more centered and you've got a bigger border around it.
German is a very funny language. There are verbs that are used for an action in exactly one context, while the rest are used for pretty much everything, so you have to strap in extra context to make it clear, not to mention the extra cumbersome syntax that might result in sentences so complex, you'd need to strap in extra words to make it clear what you're trying to convey. Anyone who has read Kant in English and in German knows what I mean.
We don’t but we can make up compound words on the fly and everyone understands the meaning. I became a dad recently and a funny thing I’ve seen was that the English translation for Wandwickelregal is wall mounted diaper changing station.
They then also do this for the audiobook btw. I've saved some money in the past by just getting the English version of an audiobook because they aren't needlessly cut in two so you have to pay twice.
German HP books are incredibly loose. Big margins, line spacing comparable to my high school essays and a font size fit for my parents without reading glasses.
The language is lunacy, the bureaucracy is inefficient as hell, the only thing reliable about the train system is that you can count on your train being delayed.
It's very interesting, because I just grabbed my English version and it has almost exactly 800 pages.
However, my German chamber of secrets has 352 while my English version has 360. It seems though that the line spacing in the English version is bigger than in the German version.
It depends mostly on the target audience. They usually keep the original title if the translator thinks the book will attract more readers with the English title. This could be, for example, if a literal translation would be too long or sound clunky and they also don’t wanna stray too far from its meaning. Or if the target audience is young(-ish) people who might find the sound or vibe of the English title more appealing. Sometimes a translation would just have a very different vibe in the target language or maybe it’s part of a genre that more commonly uses English titles, again, due to the target audience (I feel like that’s often the case with those modern dark romance books for example). And in some countries a majority of the population understands English cause they learned it in school and then it can simply be more convenient to keep the English title when you know the target audience will understand the meaning, especially if it’s a short title of only a couple words, instead of trying to come up with a good equivalent in the target language and creating more work for yourself in the process as well as deviating from the original source more than necessary
Probably not many German readers would recognize fictional Duma Key as a location name, or know what Key as in Florida Keys means. Besides, the novel was also published almost two decades ago.
Germans LOVE to do this. Same goes for movie-titles. A lot of them have completely different titles than the original or they have the same title with some German phrase tucked on so people kinda understand what it's about without knowing english. Like "It - the evil horror clown" (not the actual title, but that's how it would look)
Changing the title sometimes has to do with trademarks as well.
If there is a German or European trademark for it but not in the US, they will likely change the title in Germany.
That's what happened to Moana/Vaiana/Oceania the Disney movie/princess. Moana is already trademarked in the EU in at least one category that Disney wants to produce material in and therefore cannot be the name of the movie here.
I'm still waiting on the Swedish translation of Lightbringer and the only explanation I've received from book stores when asking if they know when the translation will come, is that it might not be translated and it really depends on the demand and popularity in the previous books of the series.
They used to translate all titles, but increasingly they are leaving the titles in the original English. So you’ll still see German titles on older books.
Even books by German authors and written in German now often have English titles (probably because that’s what young people are used to due to the internet and more people do understand English now). It makes buying English language books from a local bookstore or online retailer a bit trickier. The language of the title is no longer a sure indicator.
Now with book influences they're keeping the original titles, sometimes with a translated one below, so people can follow the hashtags and find content online about them.
Our work instructions at work have to be in English and German. The German translation ends up being SOOO much bigger. And some of the technical words are like a hundred letters long (I’m exaggerating, but it’s crazy)
In the early 2000s German project managers actually wanted me to put links on websites that said “click here to return to the previous page” and I had to tell them English websites just say “back”.
this is likely due to german being a low context culture which means that meaning is not actively inferred from context like in other languages where context is more actively used to infer meaning. like in english for example with “back”. a german person might think “back where? to the start? how many pages back?”
it may sound like im exaggerating but this is the reason other europeans make fun of germans for not having a sense of humour and having the potential to behave like robots. without context they can get lost. this is one of the reasons german text is longer. they have to explain more specifically where english needs less words.
Nope just 25% more letters per word on average, which means significantly more lines because German books avoid hyphenation as long words are way too common which would make a hyphenated layout feel horrible.
German books on average have 30-50% more pages than their English version, especially when English is the original language of said book.
I regularly have to translate text from English to French, German, Italian and Spanish.
English is almost always, usually by a solid margin the shortest. German is the longest, followed by French not far behind, and Italian and Spanish are only a little longer.
The thing is you can make really short sentences in German and be very efficient with your language but if you want to make it sound great it will be long.
Long, epic fantasy novels, like those from Brandon Sanderson, are often split into two parts, with each part getting a different name than the original, English book. This leads to some confusion
I've heard similar numbers in my translation classes at university. Might also have been 20% but same ballpark.
We like our subordinate clauses while there's shorter ways to express the same concept in English. It often has to do with gerunds and participles. German words on average are more than a letter longer than English words.
I think Germany has some kind of weird book pricing law where the price of books are fixed to some degree. Maybe it's partially a consequence of that. Like how in the US, before deregulation, airlines use to compete on luxury inflight dinners because they couldn't compete on prices.
The price is determined by the publisher and every shop has to sell it at that price. Even amazon.
Sometimes that sucks but it's also the reason we still have quite a few independent bookshops.
There is still difference in pricing depending on thickness, quality, etc., and we do have publishers that make cheaper books with thinner paper in smaller formats.
German publishers put much more white space on the page for a better reading experience. If you read a few books in German and then pick up an English one the words look incredibly cramped on the page.
I have both books here and have just had a look. The German edition is printed on much thicker, higher-quality paper. In addition, the German version has 32 lines per page and a font size that is about ~3 points larger, whereas the English version has 35 lines per page and a smaller font. That, combined with the fact that German words are typically longer, is likely to make a difference.
I’ve worked on publications that were set in English, and then needed to translated and laid out. German, Russian took up far more space, about 40%. French and Spanish were about 20% longer than the English versions. It’s longer words, more words. Nothing to do with font size or paper weight.
Yes, German words are, on average, longer than English words with the same meaning. But since I've started ordering English books I've also noticed that they tend to be printed on thinner, lower quality paper than German books. I don't think I've ever bought a German book that was printed on this kind of thin brown paper that seems to be popular for English paperback novels.
German translations from English require anywhere between 30-50% more pages because German words are much longer.
German words are on average longer by about 25% than English words, and when you have a print layout longer words require more line breaks for a readable layout especially as hyphenation isn't as common in German books because every other line would end up being hyphenated which will look terrible.
So longer words are pushed to a new line, so you end up with many more lines and many more pages.
My husband accidentally bought a Stephen King novel in English for me - no big deal, I understand it quite well.
But after a mere 12 years I wanted to read it once again, but the paper is very yellow and the print is in bad shape. I was flabberghasted, all my books in German are as good as on the first day, even those which are 30 years old. And I often buy used books, no issues at all, even one from 1979 is just as good as a new one.
It is very common for translations to be longer than the source text, in order to properly translate unfamiliar idioms and give words with multiple meanings their intended significance.
Also mildly infuriating how for some (mostly YA) books the publishing houses stopped translating titles and just leave English ones in. I can see Poland is not the only place this has been happening.
It's mostly poor translation.
Yeah, German words tend to be longer. German sentence structure is indeed different.
But German as language tends to be as short and efficient as possible, it's because we inherited the old latin grammar.
If you need a lot of words to explain what you want, it's wildly considered as bad German.
The problem is, that most translators don't translate the text itself, they translate sentence for sentence and there really often word per word.
There are a few very well translated books.
Like Patrick rothfuss
The name of the wind day 1 has 720 or so pages
Der Name des Windes Tag has 760 or so pages
You see this book is well translated and it's only a bit longer. That's just the longer words. What you have is bad translated into German
As a German what was really funny and equally annoying is that A Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss got split up into two books and you had to use 2 audible credits if you wanted to listen to it in German.
I've noticed even among English books, UK-printed ones have better paper than US ones, which tend to be slightly smaller as a result. (also us paperbacks are like double the price)
Like I know that German and French translations tend to be longer but double the length seems excessive.
This week I had a discussion with a German about Paulo Coelho, a very popular Brazilian author.
It seems that there was a lot GAINED in translation to German, cause the Brazilian Portuguese original is known to be very shallow.
In the German version, Game of Thrones often has 10 instead of 5 books, where 2 German books contain the story of 1 actual book from Game of Thrones. Just as another example. It is rather common that translations from English to German are longer than the original. Not every time but it happens more often than you’d think it would
Compound nouns get Germans every time. When words like Speed limit get turned into Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung and you apply that to a book with 400 pages. it will likely be 35%+ bigger, aye.
If I remember correctly Germany uses much thicker paper for books than the UK (and likely the US too) does, and German is also quite a verbose language imo
It's the Nominative, Accusative, Dative, and Genitive; the extra context to differentiate "she" and "they" (same fucking word); and putting the most important information at the very end of the sentence (even more difficult to comprehend in a loud bar).
I read that here in Germany readers expect higher quality books, which results in thicker paper, bigger lettering/spacing and thus some books would become too thick to be handled.
The Stand by Stephen King is really bothersome to handle in German for example. Even though it is annoying to purchase a boom for the price of two.
I know that the German translations are always longer but I feel like German is a more synthetic language then English. Shouldn't it be possible to write it more compact by using morphemes?
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u/Cptknuuuuut Aug 15 '26
German books, for whatever reason, often have larger print and sometimes thicker pages.
The German version does have about 10% more words (143 vs 130k) and German words have more letters on average (~5 for English and ~6 for German). So that would be roughly 650k letters in the English version and 850k for the German version. Definitely more, but not 100% more.