Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
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?
If you just want to check that you don't have literals there, we could
set a language with no trasnlations, which always showed the
<message-name>. That would be useful for message lookup by translators.