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Location: Language Technology Center: Articles: Text Expansion and Localized Documentation Design

A technical writer's understanding of the project's globalization strategy is critical in defining style guidelines to accommodate future translations. A critical ingredient in establishing style guides or templates is the understanding of text expansion as a result of language translation and the successful use of document real estate.

Text expansion occurs during translation for a variety of reasons: (a) many languages have equivalent words with far more characters than English (b) some languages tend to avoid the use of abbreviations (German, for instance) and (c) hyphenation and automatic line break issues may be quite different from English.

Documentation designed without considering text expansion is difficult to localize. For example, when English text is translated into Italian or German, its translation typically requires approximately 25 - 35% more physical space on a page than the English text. Thought you were done with your 500-page user manual? Well, now your page breaks are different and a one page table has expanded to two and a half pages …Think again!

Expansion issues vary widely from language to language. Believe it or not, documents can even experience text shrinkage in translations from English to Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Before you compose a document with international objectives, I suggest that you create a document template that can accommodate a text expansion rate of approximately 35%. Translations may be a bit wordier than the source document because of the nuances that translators add to ensure meaning.

The best tool for controlling text expansion is a well designed document template with specific paragraph styles that can be globally updated to different fonts or point sizes. Here are some tips on reserving document real estate for text expansion:

• Use a slightly larger type size for the source language if the source language tends to expand after translation, and use a smaller type size for the translation.
• Modify page layout: have slightly shorter text body columns in English than in localized templates to reserve some white space near page bottom for text expansion. When creating text columns or frames for automatically generated "headers/footers" on page backgrounds, allow enough space for text to wrap to a second line, even if the English text always fits in one line.
• Make table column widths slightly wider than necessary for English to allow more space for language expansion. Avoid the use of ALL CAPS in table cells in the header rows. (Or do not require ALL CAPS in the non-English version of the document.) Use smaller top/bottom/left/right margins of white space in cell margins of translated documents.
• Have a localized template to apply to translated documents with slightly reduced point sizes and decreased inter-paragraph white space. In extreme cases you may even decide to use slight font width condensing. (For example, update all paragraph styles to have 90% condensed width.)
• Avoid troublesome style combinations like justified text with no hyphenation. Such a style requires longer non-English words to drop to the next line, leaving huge "rivers" of white space between words in translated documents. Also avoid over use of nested lists with large hanging indents; this can drastically reduce available remaining text column width for longer, non-English text. A Harvard Outline indent style that goes to six levels is not pretty in German!

Don't Forget Fonts

Fonts in other languages may not correspond to the character size of the target language with the same point size. I suggest that you research the font choices you have in target languages when creating the template. If the source language uses a Roman alphabet such as English, French or German, testing should be done to predetermine final outcome when fonts and type sizes will be in Chinese, Japanese and Korean or even Middle Eastern languages.

Online Documentation

Text expansion in online documentation can be a bit more challenging than traditional printed documentation. The author cannot simply control the kerning of a translated paragraph in an HTML document and decreasing the font size can compromise text readability. Some customers who use a fixed point size in HTML have chosen to enable point size to increase or decrease in non-English versions if readability is not compromised.

Understanding text expansion can simplify the translation and localization process significantly, reducing multilingual desktop publishing costs and product time-to-market significantly.

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