Graham Harman has an interesting post on translation here.

He suggests that English to French has increased the words used, and wonders if this is a standard thing. My sense is that it isn’t necessarily true – when translating Lefebvre we used to reckon on a 10% reduction in going from French to English. But he is surely right that the biggest challenge in translation is making the final translation read well. I/we tended toward the literal, but with the added motive that Lefebvre can be a pretty clunky writer in French, and we didn’t want to smooth that over too much in the English.

Graham is talking about the experience of having his own work translated, and then reading it. I’ve not had anything of the length of a book translated, but a few articles into Spanish, Italian, German, French and Russian. The German and French were very interesting experiences, and in a few instances I was able to make corrections simply because so much of my writing was rendering terms from those languages into English, and thus I knew what I meant going back the other way.