title: Algorithm to estimate number of English translation words from Japanese source
body: <p>I'm trying to come up with a way to estimate the number of English words a translation from Japanese will turn into. Japanese has three main scripts -- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Kanji</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Hiragana</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Katakana</a> -- and each has a different average character-to-word ratio (Kanji being the lowest, Katakana the highest).</p>
  
  <p><strong>Examples:</strong></p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>computer: コンピュータ (Katakana - 6
  characters); 計算機 (Kanji: 3
  characters)</li>
  <li>whale: くじら (Hiragana --
  3 characters); 鯨 (Kanji: 1
  character)</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>As data, I have a large glossary of Japanese words and their English translations, and a fairly large corpus of matched Japanese source documents and their English translations. I want to come up with a formula that will count numbers of Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana characters in a source text, and estimate the number of English words this is likely to turn into.</p>