Limiting word length in mobile
Regarding this issue, I can think of two strategies. There is not a 100% solution for all cases, but I think the number of problems of this kind will be reduced by:
Ask translators to make short translations
In message documentation, you can provide instructions to translators on how to deal with the translation if it is long. For example, in the translation for "other relevant articles" you could indicate:
Keep it short. If the translated text exceeds twice the length of the source string, it is preferred that you just provide a translation for "other pages" or just "other" instead of the full sentence.
Indicating what is "a long sentence" is complex since many languages do not have a notion of character or word. That's why I used the source text as a reference of length.
Sometimes this is just not possible. Below is an example of the menu words in english and Malayalam using in both cases just single words (and even then you need about an extra 25% room for Malayalam):
all - page - talk - other
എല്ലാം - താൾ - സംവാദം - മറ്റുള്ളവ
Prepare the design for growth
In addition to ask for strings to be short, we can also prepare our designs to accommodate longer text. Here are some ideas:
- Make lists expandable if all elements do not fit where expected, add dynamically an option to access the rest. I made a quick modification of the mockup as an example. Note that this (a) keeps the design the same as the original when there is room for it, and (b) also allows for other kinds of growth such as more items being added later to the menu.
- Make font size smaller if text exceeds a certain length. You should make sure that the smaller font size is legible, and that similar elements do not appear next to each other with different font sizes (e.g., in the case of the list you should apply the font size reduction to all the elements of the list or none based on total length). Similarly, other layout parameters (margin/padding...) can be adjusted.
- Crop long texts. Showing part of the text with an ellipsis at the end may be enough in some cases. This is the most risky approach since you are never sure on how much of the words you are missing and, although sporadically acceptable, nobody likes to see ellipsis everywhere. So that should probably be the last attempt once you tried to make the most room for text to grow.
Pau
