Are texts in Lojban lengthy?

Some think that texts in Lojban are lengthy compared to English sentences. Two situations need to be considered.

Translation

When you translate from English then the resulting text in Lojban can indeed be lengthy if you try to precisely express every tiny bit of English meaning like of suffixes, prefixes etc.

When you translate from Lojban to English you may often get the English translation longer exactly for the same reason of literal translation. Some Lojban constructs aren't easy to express concisely in English!

Number of syllables and consonant clusters

mi djica lo ka ro moi lo prenu poi vitke ti I want to be the last person to visit this.

English sentence may sound shorter due to a large number of consonant clusters. We can find 7 consonant boundaries in English and only 3 in Lojban translation. But if we count each boundary as one syllable then Lojban translation will be one syllable shorter. Let's add a pseudo-vowel "&" into both English and Lojban sentences:

mi d&jica lo ka ro moi lo p&renu poi vit&ke ti I wan&t& to be the las&t& person& to visit& this&.

17 syllables in Lojban, 19 syllables in English!