>>One of the rare cases when you can get away without an article :). Sometimes you need a whole newspaper.
>
>Oh, you love your puns and English words with more than one meaning, don't you. :-)

I do that to each language as I learn it. Btw, accidentally the Serbian word "članak" means newspaper article, and ankle. So, "I sprained my ankle" may get someone, of persuasion similar to mine, to ask "in which newspaper?".

>Whatever, weren't we talking about sub-titles and the "foreign" talk going on for longer than the succinct English translation? Well, again, in the "dress" example above, I use c. 16 syllables whereas you used over 21. The examples seems to point to English being "shorter" to say.

IMO it was 50-50, and then it's only because the original sentence was in English. I managed to avoid several words in the first half, and then had to add several in the second. That's pretty much normal when the target language doesn't have some features that exist in the source - you have to work around them.

Depending on the quality of the interpreter, you may end up with 20-80% of the actual content translated. And its length is determined by available space - there are only two lines there. The number of lines per minute is probably determined by the perceived (or measured) reading speed of the viewers, and again by quality of the translator.

I'd conclude that if you can omit redundant words, Serbian will be shorter, even with its longer words (7:4, as measured once). In the other direction, if the original sentence wasn't really pithy, English translation may well be shorter simply because its words are generally shorter - unless the need to have articles everywhere and a pronoun to each verb, and other words to avoid ambiguity spoils this brevity.

Update: just remembered that instead of my feeble attempts at giving proper examples, I'd better use something done by better linguists and translators than I could ever be. Translations of Homer. The ones I read in the grammar school (actually called gymnasium) were translated into perfect alexandrines all the way, and I could feel the rhythm when reading them aloud or... how do you translate "read in[side] self"?

And then here I couldn't find a versified translation of either Illiad or Odyssey in English. Looks like prose translation to me. It may have the alexandrine rhythm to it, but I couldn't judge that. Since I didn't feel I'd read them in English, I didn't buy the books - so I didn't see the translator's foreword, if there was any. But I'd be curious to know what would he say.