So, a designer here at the foundation just found one of their designs
doesn't work so well for German, which has significant "text swell"
versus English.
That just reminded me of a technique I've seen used elsewhere,
pseudolocalization. Basically the system has a pseudo-locale, something
like "xx-pseudo", where
"Some text"
is automatically transformed to something like
"____ §ømë †ëx† ____"
The idea is that you can test for three things even before the
translators get to it:
- which parts of the system aren't internationalized yet (they are
noticeable since they don't get this pseudolocalization)
- text swell (150%-200% is a good ratio)
- any transformations that don't preserve unicode
Does MediaWiki or interwiki do anything like this? Would you like it if
we did?
--
Neil Kandalgaonkar ( ) <neilk(a)wikimedia.org>