I think it would be nice to be able to enforce absolute string length limits.
It could be an interesting feature for translation tools to provide length guidelines to translators in a more prominent way (e.g., indicate than the translation is longer than expected as a warning, and provide shorter alternatives to translate in such cases), but enforcing strict limits will lead to some messages not translated at all (e.g., I cannot translate "lift" to Spanish in less characters than those required for "ascensor" no matter how hard I try).
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 10:35 AM, Pau Giner pginer@wikimedia.org wrote:
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 examplehttp://i.imgur.com/GQLeMkq.png. 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
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 8:53 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
I had two topics I wanted us to discuss and agree upon that are causing lots of friction in mobile development and I would like us to resolve in current designs and future designs. (Feel free to forward to other mailing lists)
Articles Vs Pages Vs <insert word here> #################################### Recently all instances of the word 'article(s)' was switched with 'content pages' / 'pages'. This problem keeps recurring in our design and is starting to become a nuisance. I see both sides here - 3rd parties and even our own projects use our software in a different way
- sometimes pages are articles, sometimes they are definitions,
sometimes destinations etc etc.
However the word 'content page' and page is extremely ambiguous and can be confusing.
One good example is the watchlist view on mobile - it provides the ability to filter feeds by namespace:
This i18n change changed the word 'article' to 'content pages'. In this context it makes no sense. Programmatically what it actually means is show me only pages from the 'Main namespace' but to a reader the word 'articles' is arguably more understandable than 'content pages'. I would actually like us to continue using 'articles' but explore ways other instances can customise this - e.g. switch the word 'articles' to other words based on what their project is about. It would be nice for wikibooks to use the word 'books' for instance, and wikitionary 'words' or 'definitions'. Is this feasible and worth exploring? I feel like using the word pages at the benefit of generalisation seriously damages the benefit of clear and easy to understand language.
Limiting word length in mobile #####################
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.
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-- Pau Giner Interaction Designer Wikimedia Foundation