How to Control Text Contraction and Expansion in Translation

There are numerous considerations to make when localizing content for new markets. These include adapting your content for various audiences, channels, and devices, as well as understanding local customer preferences and behavior.

The length of the translated text can vary greatly, so your carefully thought out plans for interesting social media posts, polished brochures, appealing graphical user interfaces, and well-optimized paid search ads can frequently go wrong. When the text is longer, this is referred to as text expansion and when the text is shorter it is referred to as contraction.

Since text expansion and contraction vary from language to language, it's crucial to consider how this will impact your content production plans for each market you want to target. Your chosen language service provider can advise you on how these subtle translation issues might impact each project or asset you're working on.

As would be expected, content translated from English to German expands quickly. Unexpectedly, the languages that produced the most text expansion were French, Spanish, and Greek.

It just goes to show that text expansion should be taken into consideration when localizing marketing content for use in the most widely spoken European languages.

It is not surprising that across all content specializations, Asian languages have the shortest visible text lengths.

Asian languages are well known for contracting, despite the fact that characters in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are more complex than those in Latin alphabets and cannot be represented with single-byte codes. To produce coded character sets for such languages, the system needs to use two bytes to represent each character.

There is more room needed for these double-byte characters.In order for the reader to understand these complicated characters, there might also need to be more space and a larger font size. If the characters are larger or more intricately drawn, this extra room may even take the form of vertical expansion.

How to get ready for text contraction and expansion

Be aware of how much space the translated text might require when getting your English content ready for translation, and plan for it when designing your assets and user interfaces. The more extra space you have, the better, if you are aware that a particular language pair has a high rate of expansion.

Text on images falls under the same category. Make sure your assets have sufficient room to accommodate the additional text that results from text expansion without obstructing a crucial portion of the background image.

You should also think about whether to use acronyms and abbreviations in your writing. These word contractions can be difficult to translate, so linguists will usually translate them using the full words if they are unable to do so using the abbreviation or acronym. Therefore, more room will be required to take this into account.

Unexpectedly, the planning and execution of localization projects depend heavily on text expansion and contraction. Whether you're localizing your eCommerce site for a new market or organizing a global marketing campaign for a new product or service, planning ahead with text expansion and contraction in mind will help you avoid many of the design issues that could delay your project and reduce your time to market. 

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