[Mediawiki-i18n] Pseudolocalization

[Neil Kandalgaonkar]

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?

-- 
Neil Kandalgaonkar ( ) <neilk at wikimedia.org>