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Design Considerations

When designing an application that will be translated, remember to leave extra space for widgets and boilerplate labels. To accommodate multiple character sets and allow for expansion caused by translation, a rule-of-thumb is to leave 30% white space around fields, borders, and boilerplate text.

For example:

Prompt on left of field

Allow 30% expansion room to left of prompt.

Prompt above field

Allow 30% expansion room to right of prompt.

Buttons, check boxes, radio groups and poplists

Allow for 30% expansion.

Titles

Size any bounding box so the title can expand to the right by 30%.

Display-only fields

Size 30% wider than needed for the base language.

All widgets

Make widgets large enough to accommodate translation. For example, buttons need to be large enough to hold translated labels.

Check button height as well as length, to be sure the height of the button will accommodate the tallest character you need to use. For example, calculate pixels needed to render Kanji characters.