Design and Localization
over 2 years ago from Paul Hermann, Designer @ TDSoftware
Dear fellow Designers,
TLDR: How do you localize and when in the design process do you work with translators?
I'm working in small design studio in an agency that builds apps. We mainly had local customers from Germany but our latest projects were launched globally. We never bothered with optimizing the UI for longer text strings because it was designed in either German which is naturally pretty long already or English which is shorter most of the time. Now we have Portuguese and Spanish in there too, and it constantly breaks UI patterns on smaller screens, even the native and most basic ones e.g. a segmented control with 3 elements.
Currently, the design studio does the designs, then sends the strings to the translator while the developers are already building the features. If the translations are there, the devs feed them into the app — and thats where we get stuck — at this point some UIs break. At this point we need to "hot fix" the designs, which of course does not lead to ideal solutions.
If the designers would wait for the translations, a week would pass which is way too critical for most deadlines.
How do you prevent this from happening? How do you handle translations?
Best Regards, Paul.
Login to Comment
You'll need to log in before you can leave a comment.
LoginRegister Today
New accounts can leave comments immediately, and gain full permissions after one week.
Register now