[Mediawiki-i18n] Pseudolocalization

[Platonides]

Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
> So, a designer here at the foundation just found one of their designs 
> doesn't work so well for German, which has significant "text swell" 
> versus English.
> 
> That just reminded me of a technique I've seen used elsewhere, 
> pseudolocalization. Basically the system has a pseudo-locale, something 
> like "xx-pseudo", where
> 
>     "Some text"
> 
> is automatically transformed to something like
> 
>     "____ §ømë †ëx† ____"
> 
> The idea is that you can test for three things even before the 
> translators get to it:
>    - which parts of the system aren't internationalized yet (they are 
> noticeable since they don't get this pseudolocalization)
>    - text swell (150%-200% is a good ratio)
>    - any transformations that don't preserve unicode
> 
> Does MediaWiki or interwiki do anything like this? Would you like it if 
> we did?

If you just want to check that you don't have literals there, we could
set a language with no trasnlations, which always showed the
<message-name>. That would be useful for message lookup by translators.