There are many factors to consider when localizing content for new markets, from understanding local customer preferences and behaviours to ensuring cultural sensitivity and adapting content for different audiences, channels, and devices.
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Your best plans for compelling graphical user interfaces, elegant brochures, compelling social media posts, or well-optimized paid search ads can often fail when localizing content because the length of the translated text can become significantly longer or shorter. This is called text expansion (when the text is longer) or shortening (when it is shorter).
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This is a common position that many brands find themselves in, as longer and shorter text is often overlooked when planning to translate content for different channels and formats.
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Increasing the length of words is typically a way to expand the text when translating. For example, let’s take a translation from English to German. In this language pair, there is often more space for long compound words, often found in German.
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Calculating text expansion and contraction is not an exact science, as average expansion (and contraction) rates vary widely across language pairs and majors and, of course, depending on the specific text.
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This shows that text expansion should be kept in mind when localizing marketing content even when using the most common European languages.
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Regarding text shortening for all content specializations, it is not surprising that Asian languages shorten the most in apparent length.
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These complex characters may also require more space and larger font size for the reader to understand them. This extra space may even take the form of vertical expansion, especially if the characters are larger or more detailed in shape.
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Text expansion and reduction are surprisingly important in the planning and execution of localization projects. Whether you’re localizing your e-commerce site for a new market or planning a global marketing campaign for a new product or service, planning with text expansion and reduction in mind can help you avoid many design issues that can delay your project and shorten your time to market.
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