In Japanese, a single katakana can be like three letters long. ツツツ vs Tsutsutsu. 動物の森 (four 'characters') translates to Dōbutsu no Mori (thirteen characters, two spaces) but that's just romanization - it translates to Animal Forest (twelve characters, one space) which is localized to Animal Crossing (14c 1s).
Of course, sometimes it works the other way - ありがとうございます、先生 becomes thank you, sensei (but, this is just respectful thank you so could also be localized as 'sir' instead) you'll notice there's only 13 characters though, so you'll need 16 total spaces to directly translate the text.
TL;DR - information density.