When people work on a UI, I have noticed that they always pick out the German on the team (me), to translate key terms to German. Because apparently "if German fits, everything else will fit".
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There are some shorthand rules the localization teams use, but English +30% gives a base estimate for text fit. Until it doesn't. Theb an artist has to go fiddle with things to fit :P
The actually annoying part is line breaks for longer texts. Aah. the joys of game development. ❤️🧡💛
I remember working on HO games (that have a lot of static, ornamental UI elements with set sizes) and it was always the goddamn german translations that made all my beautiful buttons look like shit xD
YUp, it's usually goes like this: English - short, stupid. German - long words with terrible breakage and too many changes to rules. French - short word but man they can go on and on and on. Italian - if something don't fit just use english word.
Can confirm first hand. Whenever I’ve designed layouts that will be released in the EU it’s always the German translation that I need to prioritize. Not just length of paragraphs but also individual words for the decorative typography
Having to work with UI that has to be translated into a variety of languages; English, German, French, Dutch, Italian ... German is always the troublesome one, lol 😅
Often times teams will put a fake language in that is just the dev language with like 50% string language added, but that’s a fair bit of work, so it’s just easiest to just check the German. 😄
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The actually annoying part is line breaks for longer texts. Aah. the joys of game development. ❤️🧡💛
I think the best option it's to take an agglutinative language more than a fusional language like German.
If we're talking game lingo, in English, it's okay to shorten "3 points of damage" to "3 damage". In German, that would be grammatically incorrect.
Mostly though, I just plunk in the translation of “speed limit” and call it a day.