Something really must be done about the unjust and unfair treatment of socially media minded Germans. While we merrily Tweet to the limits of our 140 character allowance, the poor Germans find themselves cut off in their prime by the Twitter guillotine.

A simple experiment proved the case. My simple 135 character statement:

This is a test to see just exactly how many more characters it takes to translate something into German to prove that Twitter is very unfair to our Teutonic friends

Becomes a Twitter-busting 152 characters in German

Dies ist ein Test um zu sehen, genau wie viele Zeichen, die er braucht, um etwas ins Deutsche übersetzen zu beweisen, dass Twitter ist sehr unfair gegenüber den germanischen Freunde

Now some would unkindly say that the Germans have only themselves to blame for using overly long words where short ones would do (for example the simple word “pen” becomes a “kugelschreiber”) but it is not only the Weisswurst eaters who have problems.

The Greeks are even worse off with my simple phrase taking up 176 characters while in Tagalog (that’s Filipino to you and me) it is a staggering 207 characters. With character inflation like that it is not hard to see why we see so few Tweets from Athens or Manilla.

At best this is language discrimination, at worst we are seeing a conspiracy to silence the social media voices of verbose and complex languages……..which on reflection may be no bad thing.

Julian