FIGS (French, Italian, German and Spanish) Desktop Publishing

FIGS (French, Italian, German and Spanish) are, in some cases, more difficult to typeset than Chinese or Arabic because of the expansion of text when translated from English. 

French typesetting text expansion

French is the main culprit and can expand as much as 50% from the original English. Why would this be? The English language has a much larger vocabulary than French, drawing as it does on two entirely different sources (Latin + Germanic). The French language has also been much more strictly controlled by the Académie Française, which has tried to keep the language  ‘pure’ and free from foreign influences. When studying French in the 80s I always remember the ‘correct’ equivalent for ‘weekend’. The commonly used ‘Le weekend‘ was frowned upon by the Academy and the official translation was  ‘le congé au fin de la semaine‘, literally  ‘the break at the end of the week’.

Non-romance languages also tend to combine nouns much more frequently than the Latin languages and new words are more warmly welcomed into the lexicon.

Basic grammatical differences also contribute to the expansion. The possessive ‘s’ in English requires more words in French: ‘Paul’s car’ becoming ‘La voiture de Paul’, ‘bigger’ becomes ‘plus grand’ etc.

German text expansion – Compound words

One of the longest German words is Schweinefleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.
Which means the “legislative law for the monitoring of pork-meat labelling.” When typesetting German, compound words need to be hyphenated in the correct place.

Italian typesetting text expansion

In comparison, Italian is not such a problem as the text usually expands by about 10% and this can be resolved in the typesetting. You have to go back a long way to find the longest word in Italian. In 1677 the word precipitevolissimevolmente (as fast as possible), was coined.

Spanish typesetting text expansion

Spanish too does not expand so much and can usually be accommodated during the typesetting phase. If you want to be funny in Spanish, and linguistics at the same time, you can claim that the word ‘arroz’ is the longest in their language, because it starts with ‘a’ and ends with ‘z’. Who says linguists have no sense of humour?

FIGS and website translations

There is something to bear in mind if the translation is being produced for a website for these languages. Having text on images is generally a bad idea. Consider a button used on a web form or for navigation on a web site. The image is usually of a fixed length. If the translations into FIGS produces a longer word the image may have to remade. This will, at the least, be more costly or, at most, it may require a complete redesign of the web page or site.

So the general rule with FIGS is: text will expand. If the original English text and documents or web site are created with this in mind, it will save expense and hassle later on in the localisation process.