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
--
Pau Giner
Interaction Designer
Wikimedia Foundation