We Blamed the Translation Bot
On the first card of our card news, the last character of the title kept dropping to the next line in the Traditional Chinese view. At first we assumed the translation bot was writing sentences too long, so we opened a month of published posts one by one.
What We Found
The line breaks broke 8 times in a month. Every one of those 8 was a day when the Korean source title ran past 20 characters. Translation quality was not the issue. When the source is long, the same meaning grows about 1.5 times longer in English, and in Chinese the character count shrinks but each character is wider, so a lone character is left at the end of a line.
What We Changed
The rule is three lines.
1. Korean titles stay at 15 characters or fewer
2. When a title draft appears, Windy checks the length in all 4 languages first (English: 45 characters or fewer)
3. If it runs over, do not tweak the translation bot. Shorten the Korean source
The key is rule 3. We used to tell the translation bot to 「write it shorter」 whenever a screen broke, but that dropped meaning and made titles drift apart across languages. Now we trim the root, the source text, first.
Results
• Broken line breaks: 8 a month down to 1
• The remaining 1: a day when an untrimmable proper noun landed at the end of the title
• Side effect: shorter titles also read more comfortably in the Korean view
Takeaway
A multilingual problem may blow up at the translation step, but its cause often sits earlier. Putting the rule where the length is first decided, instead of where the symptom shows up, turned out to be the cheapest fix. 15 is not a universal answer, just the number that fits our card design, so measure it on your own screens once.