Different languages vary dramatically in the number of characters required to communicate a given word, phrase, or sentence. English is relatively concise, so translated versions of English text are usually longer. The VB6 docs estimates that length increases by 10% to 100%, depending on original string length: the shorter the string, the higher the % increase. See Designing an International-Aware User Interface in the Programmer's Guide.
Whatever your source and target languages, you need to worry about the effect of this variation on the appearance and functionality of your translated application. At minimum, you need to identify all instances where translated captions overflow their containers and become illegible.
Complicating the task is that string length (in characters) is a lousy measure for doing so, because proportional fonts are the rule rather than the exception in Windows, and the width of a string displayed in such a font cannot be predicted simply from its length. In our tests, we found that length changes tended to overestimate width changes in some languages (eg Italian) but to underestimate it in others (eg German).
Hence the only accurate ways to detect problems are either to run the translated version and find them visually (ugh), or to use WinAPI calls to measure the width of translated strings in the font face and point size in which they will be displayed.
VBLM will do this for you!
1) Select a language table from the list on the main window's Language Table Frame.
2) Click the Width Check command button.
3) Make any desired adjustments in the Width Checking Options dialog box that pops up, then click OK.
4) View the report in the Width Check Report Viewer.
5) Finally, if you want hard copy select Print Summary or Print Detail on the viewer's File menu.
See Also