What we broke by testing in one language

Internationalisation is not a phase for us, so we test it early — early enough that there is nothing much to test. We took the layouts we had and grew every string by about thirty-five per cent, which is roughly what English to German costs.

Four things broke. A navigation bar that fitted exactly stopped fitting. Two buttons sitting side by side became two buttons of different heights. A heading set to two lines became four and pushed its own paragraph off the screen. And one label had been centred inside a fixed-width box, which is a decision that only works in one language.

None of these were hard to fix at this stage, and all of them would have been expensive later. The same check now runs on every build, in every language we publish, at the widths where layouts actually break. A test that only runs when somebody remembers to run it is not a test.