Hi all,

When some text gets translated to different languages, the result can be very different in length depending on the languages involved.

This has implications to both development and design, and sometimes we want to quickly check how long a specific translation can become. Since I was asked about this recently, I though it would be interesting to share two simple methods I use:

The first one is to check all the translations for a given message at translatewiki.net (where MediaWiki gets translated):

1. Go to translatewiki.net 2. Search for an expression such as "reply to", and you'll get a list of all messages that contain those terms across all the projects that get translated at translatewiki (you can filter to a specific project if you want to check a specific message in Mediawiki). 3. Click on edit translation. By clicking on the translation ID you can access the "All translations" option (as shown here http://i.imgur.com/GXNVAJv.png). That will provide access to the list of all available translations https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translations&message=Nocc%3AHtml+reply+to%2Fen for a given message. 4. Take a look at the list and check the different lengths for the translations ("回复", "Reply to", "Antwoorden naar", "ಉಲ್ಲದಕ್ಕೂ ಉತ್ತರಿಸು", "இந்த முகவரிக்கு பதில் அளி"...).

Alternatively, for terms that exist on Wikipedia, Wikidata can be also used for that purpose:

1. Go to a Wikipedia article for the term you are interested in (e.g., "Question") 2. At the end of the language list on the sidebar, click on "edit links". That will gave you access to a list with the titles of the equivalent articles http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q189756#sitelinks-wikipedia in different languages. 3. Take a look a the the length of the terms in the list.

None of the methods above are bulletproof since those depend on the availability of the content you are looking for (or something similar), but can be useful in different situations.

Pau