Great, thanks so much for that. The real issue here was my (stupid) assumption about the definition of the token word. For some reason I got into my head that this meant characters, which, of course, it does not. It corresponds closer to words.
Yes, the console output might have been confusing me also.
But this is why I posted to the Beginner channel, obviously.
For anyone reading this thread in the future… use --val_max_target_length  and specify the number of tokens you want (think of them as words, not characters!)
thanks