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?