This depends on which meaning of “terse” you intend. One meaning is "using few words." Simply because of the structure of the language, French (and Spanish) often use more words than English to express the identical meaning. (For example, for the possessive French/Spanish use de + article, where English can get away with 's.) In addition, Spanish words at least have more syllables and are longer than their English equivalents.
Knowing the genre doesn’t tell us a lot about how it compares with everyday speech. Don’t you remember anything that could help us place it? I mean, compare the speeds at which people talk in this clip with this one - and they’re from the first two movies of the same writer/director! (Tesis and Abre los ojos, both by Alejandro Amenábar) I’ve seen French movies where people talked a mile a minute, others where it was more of a dropp…'d… word… every… two… cutscenes… and they were classified as romantic comedies.
In my experience with English and French, in the legal context, it is easier to be more precise in French, and thus in some contexts where precision is the goal, the French text will be shorter, on average. However, where the text in question does not need to be precise, but instead is explicative, the English is often shorter.
This can be seen in our federal statutes, and in the decisions of the Supreme Court, which are both published bilingually, side by side. Drafters of statutes favour precision as a value, and the French text of sections of statutes is usually shorter than the English text. However, in judgments, the role is to explain a legal principle and its application, and the English version of the individual paragraphs tends to be shorter than the French version.
Do the French have a word for riposte?
It may be just common in subtitles, in any language. They’ve got to fit them onto the screen.
I watched English programs with English subtitles for a while (until I figured out the controls on a new TV). And I noticed that the subtitles were condensed – they often dropped some of the phrases that the actors said.
Depends whether you’re watching with subtitles or closed captions, too.
Subtitles are generally intended for people who understand the language being spoken on screen at least a little bit, or understand it perfectly but the speaker has a funny accent. So if a given sentence fragment is simple enough, the translator might assume the audience will get it and focus on the more complex bits, or a summation of the general meaning.
Closed captions OTOH are intended for the hearing impaired, and they typically run on longer and are more precise. They will also often include descriptions of sound effects, meaningful musical cues, intonations, that sort of thing.
I would like to add that in informal language many French expressions are indeed shorter than their English equivalent, especially short questions. For instance:
fr: Ça va?
en: Are you okay?
fr: Tu viens?
en: Are you coming?
fr: C’est prêt?
en: Is it ready?
fr: Oh! Ça va pas?
en: Hey, what the fuck’s wrong with you, man?
English has the concept of Noun Adjunct in which a noun can function as an adjective to modify another noun. Example: “Chicken burrito”, in which “chicken” modifies “burrito”. Spanish and French seem to lack this construction (although Hebrew has a substantially similar construct). In proper Spanish, we would have to say “Burrito de pollo” (Burrito of chicken), although the Spanglish construct “pollo burrito” is common now.
From the Wikipedia article:
Here’s an X-treme example: I worked for a company once that wrote a Cash Register app. It had a multi-page dialog box (which we called an “entry form”) to enter configuration settings. At the end of the last page was the message:
End of Register Configuration Entry Form
But in our Spanish edition, this phrase became:
Fin de Forma de Entrada de Configuración del Registro
(Literally: End of form of entry of configuration of the register.)
Really? My main use for subtitles is for movies in languages where I can’t understand one goddamned word, and they seem to work fine for that purpose.
Yup. The assumption is that if the viewer didn’t understand the first goddamned word, they would watch the dubbed version instead - assuming one is available, of course. That’s why the dub is there in the first place, after all :).
I know it’s not the case for every single viewer out there (fact is, I kinda prefer watching Japanese and Russian films subbed than dubbed myself, even if I don’t understand a blithering thing they say, simply because I like the way those languages sound), but it still is the expected general trend where movie translation firms are concerned.
Yikes. I can’t stand watching dubbed movies, it’s awful.
While subtitles aren’t always perfect, I’ve never had the impression that I’ve missed out on anything important in the dialogue (OK, except in some very rare cases), although I guess I’m not getting every nuance.
Kobal2 is correct 100%.
I teach English at a French university and here’s a real example of how the students write:
The other pragmatic reason to this change is that the communications agency I had the chance to join is based in a Muslim country, which basically meant reduced - to no - activity during Ramadan, a month-long lifestyle shift that not only includes shortened working hours but ended well into August, the holiday season.
I spend a majority of time teaching them English sentence structures which basically amounts to Keep It Simple Stupid. French is not terse at all. To me, it’s a language that encourages the speaker to ramble on and on and on.
That’s why I enjoy Spanglish. You can drop artlcles, they’re in the verb, but you don’t have to go the other way and figure out what noun to use.
Sent con Tapatalk
Your Tapatalk speaks Spanglish too? 
Arrrrgh! ¡Formulario!
Forma = procedure, process; form as in “good form” in sports or dance. Esta es la forma de introducir los datos = this is the procedure to enter data.
Formulario = form as in “piece of paper or screen with spaces that need to be filled”. Este es el formulario de introducción de datos = this is the form you use for data entry.
Movies dubbed into English are really shitty done.
English movies/showes dubbed into German/French/Italian are usually dubbed very well. The industry is geared for it and does a really good job – depending on costs allowed for the movie/show in question.
For the most part people in Germany/France/Italy also would not watch the movie in English – they want it in their native language.
[cites out of chronological order]
The reason for this is encapsulated in the terse repartee above between John Mace and bob++: the French words in English and American Law were maintained precisely because it would be long-winded–wordy–to get at their meaning in English, and everybody knew what what was being talked about. Imagine having to translate the 1-2 dialogue above into English…
Also, FWIW, Proust’s rivers and eddys of single sentences, with their colors and backtrack re-washing of commentary and context, are so glorious, and I can languidly float and be rocked on them more easily in French, which is not my native language, than English, which is. (The preceding poorly written purpleness is my personal property.) I always thought that that was a translation thing, but now I’m beginning to understand it’s intrinsic.
Someone above mentioned Hebrew…There I do get it, particularly with Biblical Hebrew, which grafts tenses, subjects, and direct and indirect objects onto a single verb stem. In theory Modern Hebrew could do this, but walking down Jerusalem talking this way is best left to specialists and wannabe prophets (both crowded fields there). It is absolutely stunning to see phrases or images central to Western languages and culture in such a sort of titanic solidity, a kind of terseness when you get down to it.
I’ve watched several French-language movies with French subtitles. The subtitles tend to summarize the actual dialog. This happens with English subtitles as well. You shouldn’t draw conclusions on the whole language based on the subtitles.
Right, but that assumes that you have a straight-forward definition of ‘word’ and that that is a useful category to think about this issue. In fact, words are a complicated linguistic category, in that it’s hard to say where one starts and the other begins. Is dog house one word, or two? In Dutch it’s hondenhok, so that looks more like one, but ‘dog house’ is clearly one of something too, even if English chooses to spell it as two. The Dutch just glues ‘hond’ and ‘hok’ together, but the resulting noun is clearly a compound. So which of the two is more terse here?
The same goes for letters. Some languages write letters that they don’t pronounce; others don’t. But again that is more a question of how to translate sounds to written text, than it is about the amount of information needed to convey a message. In the whole history of language, writing is a pretty recent thing.
Let’s return to compound nouns, though, and look at apple pie. Or tarte aux pommes in French, appeltaart in Dutch, *Apfelkuchen *in German, and jablečný dort in Czech. Which is the tersest? English has the fewest letters, Dutch and German the fewest words, but in a way, they’re all the same: they put together the words for apple and pie in the way that the syntax of each language forces them to do so. English just lines them up, so do Dutch and German but they eliminate the space when writing (syntactically there’s no difference here). French introduces the pie first and adds the apples later as a sub-clause under the preposition à combined with the plural article les to form aux. And Czech turns the noun for apple (jablko) into an adjective by adding ‘-ný’ to the stem ‘jablk-’ and executing some phonetic changes to make it all work. But in the end, in all these five languages, you can reduce what they do to [apple]+[pie]+[syntax] - and the number of concepts that goes in to each of these words is 2 for each of the languages. So by that count, they’re all equally terse; now if there was a language (and I’m sure one exists somewhere) that has a non-compound word for apple pie (ie a word to denote apple pie that does not somehow contain apple or pie), and it did so consistently for all sorts of words that most other langauges have compound nouns for, then that would be the terser language.
No cite, other than me speaking about 10 languages, give or take - but I realize that that may not be sufficient for you. I’m not a linguist, unfortunately, so definitely don’t take my word for it. I don’t think I contradict Wolverine per se, though - It’s possible that for some definitions of ‘terse’ and for some utterances (to be taken broadly to include long texts as well as spoken word) you will find a difference, indeed, some of those are well documented and people in the thread have given examples. I’m just arguing that such differences are probably the result of culture, rather than the constraints and/or possibilities placed on speakers by the grammar and syntax of the language.
You are a linguist. I think you’re saying you’re not a linguisiticologist.
If you or anybody is either, please invent an English noun similar to “linguist” for someone who knows linguistics. You know, terse.
Hebrew is not alone in doing any of those things, lots of other languages supply information by adding suffixes to stems. It’s just a way of arranging the building blocks inside a sentence, though. Both ‘we are’ and ‘sumus’ (latin for ‘we are’) do the same thing: they put together a form of the verb ‘to be’ with a marker for the first person plural. Why is one necessarily terser than the other? I suppose you could argue there’s a certain redundancy in languages that use personal pronouns and still decline their verbs, but that seems like a stretch.