Show HN: Longest Translation – Handy utility for multi language designs (opens in new tab)

I've tried "once upon a time there was a king" (the first common words in a lot of fairy tales), which in Romanian should have been translated in five words - "a fost odată un împărat". This tool gives me "cu mult timp în urmă a Trăit-o a fost regele" - double of that amount (and I stop before getting into comments about the translated content itself)!

Very nice but your missing the worst offender... Greenlandic :)

Checkout the most translated website in the world to see some of these languages in action http://jw.org - Here is Greenlandic http://www.jw.org/kl/

Simple, useful, and well executed.

Thanks for sharing! (or... Mübadiləsi üçün təşəkkür edirik!)

My one thought is that string length in pixels is more important than character count, but you sidestep that issue by showing all the results. You can easily see if one is longer even though it has fewer characters.

The Chinese for "hello" was sort of correct. It returned 喂 on the bottom of the list, but that's really "hello?" like answering the phone, not 你好 which is actually hello. I was surprised by its selection there.

As a quick explanation. Very simple utility for quickly seeing what is the longest translation (by number of characters) for a specific word/phrase.

Plan to keep this online until I hit my API call limit then will post the source over the weekend!

Enjoy!

Can you add an option to select the input language? For example if I submit a Japanese phrase, all the languages give identical results, which is the phrase itself.

Well done, this is actually well executed and quite useful to quickly check translations for menus, dialog boxes and so on

What do you use to translate and what is the quality rate on it?

wow the front-end makes a separate ajax call for each language - efficient!