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Understanding expansion and contraction in translations and preparing for it

What is it? 

The length of a translation almost always differs from the source material. This is called translation expansion and translation contraction.

Expansion

When you translate from English into another language such as French, Spanish, German, or Russian, the translated text is typically longer than the source text. This expansion can reach up to 15% in Russian, up to 20-25% in French and Spanish, and up to 35% and sometimes 50% in German.

Contraction

When you translate from English to Finnish, Swedish, or Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese, the translated text is typically shorter than the source text. This contraction can reach 10 to 30% (Swedish and Finnish, respectively), and up to 55% in Japanese.

Translating to English from French or Spanish will also contract the text.

Other factors

Factors other than language that can affect the length of a translation is the style and grammar used, the syntax, the terminology, etc. 

Anticipating expansion

You can anticipate and mitigate the effects of expansion by adapting the size of your text fields accordingly.

For the purpose of this article, this section focuses on translation expansion. Because a shorter translated text fits in the the same field as a longer source text, contraction is unlikely to cause any issue.

Fields in Salesforce

Salesforce supports up to 131,072 characters for each rich text area field, including the HTML tags. This is plenty for the majority of translation use cases. However, administrators can also set a lower limit. Make sure to check the set field size with your administrator.

Custom fields can have different types:

  • Text: up to 255 characters
  • Text Area: up to 255 characters
  • Text Area (Long): up to 131,072 characters

You can create a custom field and give it a "Text Area (Long)" type to replace a "Text"-type field that is too short.

Fields in Zendesk

Standard ticket fields in Zendesk can be limited in size. For example, the Subject field for tickets supports up to 255 characters only. However, you can create custom field types in Zendesk. Custom text fields can support the following:

  • Text: up to 65,536 characters
  • Multi-line: up to 65,536 characters

 

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