One card, four different ways to break
We made a card beautifully in Korean, then exported the English version, and the title spilled right out of the frame. The Traditional Chinese version had the opposite problem: it looked empty. Same design template, same meaning, very different results.
The cause is character width, not character count
Korean and Chinese characters are wide, while English words are long, so the number of characters that fit on one line differs a lot. A single rule like 「18 characters per line」 could never fit all four languages.
Try it yourself: build a per-language limit table
1. Pick the 5 cards that came out best so far and count how many characters actually fit on one line in each language.
2. Subtract about 10% as a safety margin and use that as the limit.
3. Put the result into a table like the one below and paste it into your Claude Code instruction file.
Card text limits
• Title: ko 16 / zh 14 / cn 14 / en 28 characters
• Body line: ko 22 / zh 20 / cn 20 / en 40 characters
• If a limit is exceeded, do not cut words. Rewrite the sentence with the same meaning.
• After writing, show the character count per language as a table first.
The last two lines do the real work
If you only write 「shorten it when it is too long」, the bot chops words in half and the meaning breaks. Adding 「rewrite」 and 「show me the count table first」 made review a one-glance job. Cards needing rework dropped from 7 out of 10 to 1.
One line to keep
Four languages are not four translations, they are four formats. Decide the size of the box per language first.