The methods this paper employed may certainly be biased in a way that makes Japanese appear less information-dense than other languages.
As for the _written_ language's density, that's entirely different! You say that as written, translations come out to be about the same in Japanese and English, I assume this corresponds to roughly the same number of characters as well? If so, if we can believe the authors of the paper above that Japanese has less information-per-syllable, then perhaps Japanese writing's syllabic/ideographic writing system accounts for this handily such that the information density of _written_ Japanese is about the same as written English.
For what it's worth, I think you were agreeing with me actually:
> Take a look at the front page of a Japanese newspaper and show it to an English speaker, they will think it's "crowded", but I bet if you translated it to English you'd see something that resembles a typical English paper.
What I meant here was that in terms of _written_ information density there are clearly significant gains made thanks to the writing system.
The methods this paper employed may certainly be biased in a way that makes Japanese appear less information-dense than other languages.
As for the _written_ language's density, that's entirely different! You say that as written, translations come out to be about the same in Japanese and English, I assume this corresponds to roughly the same number of characters as well? If so, if we can believe the authors of the paper above that Japanese has less information-per-syllable, then perhaps Japanese writing's syllabic/ideographic writing system accounts for this handily such that the information density of _written_ Japanese is about the same as written English.
For what it's worth, I think you were agreeing with me actually:
> Take a look at the front page of a Japanese newspaper and show it to an English speaker, they will think it's "crowded", but I bet if you translated it to English you'd see something that resembles a typical English paper.
What I meant here was that in terms of _written_ information density there are clearly significant gains made thanks to the writing system.