You guys speak really fast. In real life I speak a lot slower more like Jeff Bridges as The Dude…
Are “you guys” italian people?
If so, I think you’re right. Maybe that’s because italian sentences are longer than English ones, and we’re used to listen them shrinked to fit English lip sync in the dubs of the american movies…
Yes, pardon my casual speech.
That´s interesting. Of course that would make it impossible to find out how italians talked before movies. Because there´d hardly be any sound recordings.
If you watch italian movies from the 50es and 60es, they talked much slower than in today’s american dubbed movies or in today’s italian movies. Anyway my theory is just a suggestion. Maybe simply italian language has sentences which are too long for today’s frenetic times 
I really need to rewatch 8 1/2…but I don´t really want to.
Then again I´ve watched all the Don Camillo movies with Fernandel in italian and they talk really fast there too, but that might be because they´re comedies.
They do this in the German dub too. 
Well of course, because they have to adapt to the lip movements. Watching french and italian movies in german dub is really weird because people talk much faster than you´re used to hearing in german. Japanese is the other way round hence there´s many awkard pauses and breaks in german dubs. Luckily german and english are close enough to each other that there´s hardly any noticable jarring inconsistencies like that.
Well, there are enough example where they don’t care. Beside the japanese movies there is for example “Die 2” (English: The Persuaders!) where the German dub is much faster than the English original. 
Maybe because those were done by the same people who did the dubs for the Bud Spencer and Terrance Hill movies, which were originally as you know in italian 
According to Wolfram Alpha:
typical italian translation lenght = 1.2 x English lenght
(that’s true also for Dutch).
For Spanish, French, German for example it stops at 1.1 (it needs more decimals to be more accurate anyway).
Modern italian national language derives mostly from Florentine and Sicilian, two romanic languages (still dialects) that have words that mostly end with vowels. If you hear other dialects (like mine from Naples or Zak’s one from Milan) most words do not end in vowels so they are short and voice emissions are fewer.
Consider that italian language is a language where you mostly spell letters exactly as you see them and there are not mute endings. You have to pronounce everything. In particular florentine people, tend to aspirate words so the lenght of italian in their mouths seem not so. Sometimes I feel like I can feel the discomfort of a Lombard or a Neapolitan to pronounce all the letters…eheheh
That surprises me. I thought that German was the language with the longest words… (and the lowest entropy).
For sure German is, as far as I know, the language with longest words. Because you can build up them. I remember, from my school days: Wissenschaftslehre (Dottrina della scienza), which basically in italian or english or many other languages is split up in two or three words.
But if you consider similar words like
pen/penna
form/forma
English/Inglese
and many many others
they are not the longest, but are usually longer than counterparts.
That is another thing. Your onomatopoeia for laughing is very different from ours.
I wonder how the french (who usally don´t pronounce the h at the beginning of a word) write it…
Maybe this is the reason: Where other languages have to use two or more words, we in Germany can use only one (long) word.
But the German words are even longer. For example:
pen/penna/Stift (3 to 5 to 5 letters)
form/forma/Formular (4 to 5 to 8 letters)
English/Inglese/Englisch (7 to 7 to 8 letters)
So the entropy is more worse in German than in Italian. So the “german translation length” should be higher than 1.1…
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Compare two versions of Frank Herbert´s Dune.
You got 535 pages in english (Ace) versus 880 pages in german(Heyne). Of course typeface and space use of pages factors into it too, but the trend is clearly to english being a lot shorter.
Yes, but that’s not the question. According to Wolfram Alpha Italian should have a lower entropy than German - and I can’t believe that. So you have to compare the Italian version of the novel with the German.
Maybe Wolfram Alpha is not that accurate… Maybe they are more similar in average lenght than it seems from those numbers above.
In effect, when I watched some episodes of some German series like Derrick, Unser Charly or Ein fall fur zwei (thanks Wikipedia for original titles!) It seems that dubbers didn’t have to talk faster to fit actors’ labial movements.
That’s interesting: it could be also ahahah (bold laughing), or hihihihihi (tight laughing), and I always figure out the laughing in my head according to how it 's written… eheheh
How do you write it in German?
What´s the italian title La Duna? 
Derrick and Ein Fall für Zwei.
Especially Derrick isn’t representative: The actors are talking incredibly slow and in a monotone and boring tone(*). So they should be easy to translate into other languages. (And I bet that the dubbed versions are much better than the originals. )
(*) That’s why we in Germany are confused about the great popularity in other countries…
As you undoubtedly have seen already on this forum many go Hahaha (in english dialects often with an added silent H at the end) because that´s the way we laugh. From deep from belly. While the eh eh eh can only come from the larynx. It starts with different approaches to laughing I guess.
Would have been funny if he´d written “Einfall für Zwei”