The UI Text Space Calculator

Definition

You are designing or developing a new user interface (UI). The user-friendliness and intuitiveness of this new UI will be crucial to its success not just in the development language, but also in all translated versions. You must therefore ensure the following:

Translators into all target languages have enough space in the translation editor to write out their translations, instead of being forced to enter abbreviations.
All translations are displayed in full on the UI, instead of being truncated.

The UI text space calculator enables you to achieve these goals.

Note

The UI text space calculator is used by UI designers and developers during the development cycle, not by translators during the translation cycle. It is a quality assurance step to avoid abbreviations and truncated texts on user interfaces, which give rise to the following problems:

Abbreviated texts such as COAr and PerNo are nowhere near as user-friendly or intuitive as full texts such as Controlling Area and Personnel Number. They therefore have a negative impact on user satisfaction.
Truncated texts cause similar problems.

For example, Данные производства is Russian for Production Data. If the last four characters of this Russian translation are simply not displayed on the user interface, user satisfaction suffers as a result even if the user can guess what Данные производ is supposed to mean.
Some abbreviations are so unclear that they cause confusion, and may even lead to user errors.

For example, CC could stand for any of the following:
- Company Code
- Cost Center
- Carbon Copy
- Component Controller
- Configuration Component
- Cash Concentration
- Cycle Counting
Abbreviations and truncated texts considerably increase the amount of time that you need for the pseudo-translation phase of the development project. By using the UI text space calculator to avoid such texts on translated interfaces, you help ensure that pseudo-translation finds far fewer bugs for you to fix during the development cycle that would otherwise cause problems, and significantly increase costs, during the subsequent translation cycle.
Abbreviations often lead to requests for you to modify and re-transport objects so that translators have enough space to enter full translations. Finding, modifying, re-transporting, and re-translating objects is far more time-consuming and expensive than ensuring from the outset that translators have enough space to enter full translations.
Abbreviations have a detrimental effect on the quality of any translation memory that you decide to use, such as the proposal pool for short texts translated in the short text editor. This can cause quality problems and longer turnaround times.

Use

If there is no need for you to restrict the length of your UI strings, then don’t restrict them!

If you do need to restrict the length of your UI strings, use the UI text space calculator to help avoid the problems listed above. It enables you to:

Provide enough space for all translators into all languages as you design and develop new user interfaces.
Ensure that translations are not truncated when displayed on your new UIs.

Note

You can use the UI text space calculator for all programming languages and development environments.
The recommendations in the UI text space calculator are merely a guide. Experience shows that they prevent text space problems for approximately 95% of SAP texts. Nevertheless, even if you follow every recommendation all of the time, it does not necessarily mean that every translator into every target language will always have enough space to write out their translations in full.
Even if a text string length is unrestricted and every translation is perfect, this does not automatically mean that every translation will fit into the UIs and look great in every language. You can refer to the values in the Size Unit em* column to ensure that you have reserved enough space for all translations on your UIs.
It's okay to ignore outliers, if necessary. For example, your English text has a length of 5, so you extend the text string length to 14 in accordance with the UI text space calculator. This provides enough space for every translation into every language except Hungarian, which needs 22 characters. If extending the text string length to 22 characters has a detrimental effect on the quality of the English UI, then it's okay not to extend the text string length even if the quality of the Hungarian UI suffers as a result.

The UI text space calculator consists of two tables, depending on whether your development language is English or German.

Table for development language English:
EN Source Text Length	Minimum Recommended Text String Length	Size Unit em* (average case width)
1-4 characters	Extend to 10 characters	*66% of minimum recommended text string length in em, rounded up or down to the nearest whole number, e.g. 17 em for 26 characters
5 characters	Extend to 14 characters	Ditto
6 characters	Extend to 16 characters	Ditto
7 characters	Extend to 18 characters	Ditto
8-10 characters	Extend to 20 characters	Ditto
11 characters	Extend to 22 characters	Ditto
12 characters	Extend to 24 characters	Ditto
13-15 characters	Extend to 26 characters	Ditto
16 characters	Extend to 28 characters	Ditto
17-20 characters	Extend to 32 characters	Ditto
21-80 characters	Add 50% characters	Ditto
81+ characters	Add 30% characters	Ditto

Table for development language German:
DE Source Text Length	Minimum Recommended Text String Length	Size Unit em* (average case width)
1-4 characters	Extend to 10 characters	*66% of minimum recommended text string length in em, rounded up or down to the nearest whole number, e.g. 17 em for 26 characters
5 characters	Extend to 14 characters	Ditto
6 characters	Extend to 18 characters	Ditto
7 characters	Extend to 20 characters	Ditto
8-10 characters	Extend to 20 characters	Ditto
11-15 characters	Extend to 26 characters	Ditto
16 characters	Extend to 28 characters	Ditto
17-20 characters	Extend to 30 characters	Ditto
21-80 characters	Add 50% characters	Ditto
81+ characters	Add 30% characters	Ditto