Michael Mitzenmacher, at Harvard, had a paper in the 2003 IEEE Data Compression Conference that gave empirical evidence that translations compressed to roughly similar sizes (using the Bible and the EU texts), but had wildly varying sizes uncompressed; this correlates well with linguistic theories.
This is one of the reasons that texting is so darn popular in China, and email is not. Texting is fast, and you can pack so much info into a single SMS that you almost never need to send anything longer.
The same goes for books and essays. Chinese books and magazines are often shorter, just because the information density is so high. It's a neat feature of the language.
However, sometimes it can be demoralizing when you spend all evening writing something and realize that you've only produced a single page of text.
> This is one of the reasons that texting is so darn popular in China, and email is not. Texting is fast
I don't see why texting in Chinese should be faster than in English.
Don't you need to push a similar number of bits through the numeric keypad? I'd imagine that to be the limiting factor.
i.e. English texters need to send more chars, but they're choosing from fewer chars so need fewer keypresses to select each one. Chinese texters need to send fewer chars, but I imagine they need to make more keypresses to select each char.
If you are willing to do a bit of encoding/decoding, then you can map 2 or 3 latin-1 characters onto one unicode codepoint, and then tweet with that instead.
My understanding of UTF-8 indicates that you can actually represent any number as one character, but somewhere in the xterm / firefox / twitter pipeline, that gets fucked up. I think I have some code on github for this, actually:
The idea is to pack any utf-8 string into one character. It works for about 3 or 4 ASCII characters, but I think this is a perl bug rather than some fundamental limitation. Patches welcome.
(As an aside, I am always pleased when I get to use the (>>=) operator in Perl. And yes, I do pronounce it "bind" and not "right-shift-equals" ;)
Kaifu Lee mentioned the same observation in a talk. Chinese news titles usually bear sufficient information that Google news in Chinese doesn't need excerpt as counterpart in English. A Tweet in Chinese could be an essay.
[+] [-] lsb|16 years ago|reply
ftp://ftp.deas.harvard.edu/techreports/tr-12-02.ps.gz
[+] [-] est|16 years ago|reply
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9sjt0/rudebox_b...
[+] [-] megaduck|16 years ago|reply
The same goes for books and essays. Chinese books and magazines are often shorter, just because the information density is so high. It's a neat feature of the language.
However, sometimes it can be demoralizing when you spend all evening writing something and realize that you've only produced a single page of text.
[+] [-] jbert|16 years ago|reply
I don't see why texting in Chinese should be faster than in English.
Don't you need to push a similar number of bits through the numeric keypad? I'd imagine that to be the limiting factor.
i.e. English texters need to send more chars, but they're choosing from fewer chars so need fewer keypresses to select each one. Chinese texters need to send fewer chars, but I imagine they need to make more keypresses to select each char.
[+] [-] actionjackson|16 years ago|reply
1. SMS is cheaper than calling.
2. China is LOUD, there are times I don't hear a phone call because there are so many people and their cellphones around.
3. And yes, you can fit as much info in an text as an email.
[+] [-] jrockway|16 years ago|reply
My understanding of UTF-8 indicates that you can actually represent any number as one character, but somewhere in the xterm / firefox / twitter pipeline, that gets fucked up. I think I have some code on github for this, actually:
http://gist.github.com/191446
The idea is to pack any utf-8 string into one character. It works for about 3 or 4 ASCII characters, but I think this is a perl bug rather than some fundamental limitation. Patches welcome.
(As an aside, I am always pleased when I get to use the (>>=) operator in Perl. And yes, I do pronounce it "bind" and not "right-shift-equals" ;)
[+] [-] tlrobinson|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johannchiang|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
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