Too many vowels for 'Stay with me'
Godot's doubled-vowel test text makes me want to move a dialogue button before asking a translator to shorten the invitation.
Godot has a setting called double_vowels. Turn it on for pseudolocalization and the vowels in a string repeat, making the text longer so a developer can look for overflow.[1] I like the small indignity of it. A carefully spaced menu has to accommodate words that have suddenly become less convenient.
Reading the documentation, I started imagining a dialogue choice in a game: “Stay with me.” It fits neatly beneath a character portrait. A longer version might push the last word out of the button. That is an invented example, not a bug I found in a released game, but it made the setting feel less like an obscure testing option. The bit that disappears could be the reason for choosing the line.
This is a reflection on an existing tool, not a new Godot announcement or a hands-on test. What interests me is the chance to discover that a design is cramped before asking a translator to work inside it.
The awkward-looking version
Godot’s documentation describes several ways to make text deliberately troublesome. It can substitute accented characters, double vowels, or pad a string with underscores using an expansion ratio.[1] The accents can expose untranslated strings and missing font glyphs; the longer text can reveal containers that cannot hold it.[1]
I find that uglier preview appealing. A finished-looking screen can discourage changes that disturb its composition. Make the words conspicuously strange and the screen becomes easier to question. The button’s width stops looking inevitable.
W3C’s internationalization guidance explains why a little spare space cannot be a universal fix. Short source messages can expand especially sharply in translation, while character width and line height introduce problems that character counts alone cannot describe.[2] It recommends flexible layouts and letting text reflow rather than squeezing it into small fixed spaces.[2]
For a story game, I care about more than whether every letter remains visible. Imagine that “Stay with me” is the vulnerable option beside a brisk refusal. If the vulnerable line becomes tiny while the refusal stays comfortably readable, the two choices acquire a visual difference the writer may never have intended. If one wraps and the other does not, their timing may feel different too. Those are design questions I would want someone to inspect, not outcomes a vowel-doubling switch can judge.
The translator might find an excellent shorter line. That possibility deserves a conversation, rather than an automatic instruction to make the words fit. I’d be uneasy asking someone to preserve a character’s hesitation while treating the original button width as the one thing nobody may revise.
Room for a different sentence
There is a fair objection here: space is part of the work. A speech balloon has a shape. A compact menu can keep attention on the scene, and a huge dialogue panel can cover the expression that gives a line its meaning. Translation has to negotiate those constraints, just as the original writing does. I don’t want every screen to become an oversized box waiting for its longest possible label.
What appeals to me about testing early is that more of those constraints may still be negotiable. Perhaps the choice panel can grow vertically. Perhaps a portrait can move. Perhaps the original line also benefits from an edit. I would rather consider those options while arranging the scene than discover, after the art and layout feel finished, that the translator is expected to solve everything alone.
Godot also recommends named placeholders where possible, so translators can change the order in which inserted values appear.[3] I like that permission to change the sentence’s structure. Keeping English word order would be an odd requirement to impose on the person asked to make the line sound natural.
None of this makes pseudolocalization a substitute for a translated build and people who can read it. Godot’s own guide warns that its readable altered strings are not an effective font-support test for CJK or right-to-left languages.[3] I would be careful about reporting a clean preview as “localization passed.” I have only read the documentation here; I haven’t even earned that narrower preview result.
I do want to keep the doubled vowels in mind when looking at an elegant interface. For that imagined scene, I would try giving “Stay with me” a second line before asking the translator to shorten the invitation.
Sources
[1] Godot 4.7: Pseudolocalization
[2] W3C Internationalization: Text size in translation