> In addition to this the patch in question brought up a second topic:
> word length on mobile. On the watchlist view we have several tabs as
> illustrated in this question which are optimised for single words (and
> potentially can be truncated using the ellipsis method if necessary)
> http://imgur.com/Jiv0XPJ
>
> As you can see in the diagram - 2 words do not work very well in this
> kind of view. I suggested a qqq constraint to limit translations to
> single words - https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/97935/ - do we think
> these sorts of constraints are okay for mobile? Another approach to do
> a similar design would be to use icons, but icons in themselves have
> even greater problems for translation.

Of course, the ideal thing is to make screen elements work with any string length. By all means, please do strive to make it so.

That said, we don't live in such an ideal world. Even some of our own tools sometimes have "strings-that-should-be-short". If there's really no choice and a translation must be short, writing a suggestion about this in qqq that is the bare minimum. A nice thing to do would be to have an automatic test somewhere to check the string length of all the translations of strings that are marked as such.