[function_seven]

> Spanish is a lot more dense than English or French and might tokenize better.

I'm no linguist, so I apologize if I'm misinterpreting this statement. My impression has always been that Spanish is less dense than English, only because in almost all cases, the Spanish version of product instructions is wordier. Look at the back of a shampoo bottle[0] and notice that the Spanish version is either longer, or a smaller font, to fit it all.

[0] https://i.postimg.cc/xd2X5WJN/Ghub-Fo-N11u8jz-Pjj-RDt-W-CGA9...

[asveikau]

Instruction manuals are going to be translated and they're hopefully verbose such as to be explicit.

One area where Spanish is more dense is verb forms, because it retains most of the inflected verbs of Latin, whereas English has lost or merged together a lot of the historical Indo-European inflections. Speaking intuitively, I think it, like most Latin languages, tends to be a bit more verbose with noun phrases.

[saurik]

Another way to measure this is speaking rate. What I remember from linguistics courses is 1) that whole different cultures seem to speak at different average speeds, the information content transferred per second of speech seems to be remarkably consistent across languages; and 2) people speak Spanish more quickly than they speak English.

[dragonwriter]

It's probably not a good idea to judge the density of a language by product instructions that are probably a minimally workable translation into the language.