examples
Every screen below is invented and drawn for this page. None of it is client work, and none of it is a screenshot of anybody's product.
Translated text is drawn as a grey bar. No language, locale or market is confirmed for this company, so setting these screens in one would claim support we have not agreed with anybody. Length, direction and format are the parts that break a layout, and those are shown exactly.
A toolbar drawn for three short labels. It was given a fixed height, no wrapping and no scrolling, because in the source language it never needed any.
row overflows · no wrap · no scroll
The third action is still in the markup and still focusable, and nobody using a mouse will ever find it. Either the row wraps, or the least used action moves into a menu.
Three cards, side by side, each with a title and a button. One title is now long enough to take three lines instead of one.
Nothing is cut and nothing is unreadable, yet the three buttons now sit at three different heights, which reads as carelessness in any language. A shared row height, or titles pinned to a fixed number of lines, settles it.
A notification card built to hold two lines. In the source language the date sat on the first line; after translation it has moved to the third.
Harbour Lane Books
cut here
Truncation is not automatically a fault. It becomes one when the part removed is the part the message existed for. Harbour Lane Books is invented, as is everything on this card.
The space under the field was given a fixed height, sized against the shortest error the form could produce.
Card number
Expiry date
The message needs two lines and the layout allows it one. The user is told that something is wrong, while the half of the sentence explaining what has been cut away.
Two menu entries were built in the code rather than read from the file, so they were never sent for translation and nobody noticed until the screen existed.
This one is fixed in the code rather than in the string file: the string has to be taken out of the code and put into the file before it can be translated at all.
The same source term was translated twice, by two people, at two different times, with no agreed list between them.
nav.basket
checkout.basket
same source term · two renderings
Nothing is cut, nothing overflows, and every automated check passes, so there is nothing here for a check to catch, and it is the one an agreed terminology list prevents outright.
The page was mirrored for a right-to-left layout, but the icon inside the search field was positioned in absolute terms rather than relative to the reading direction.
icon pinned to the left edge
The text now begins at one end of the field and the symbol that explains it sits at the other, hard against the previous element. Logical properties fix it; a second stylesheet for the mirrored version does not, because the position is still stated in absolute terms.
A confirmation screen showing a delivery date in digits only, formatted by whatever the system it was generated on happened to be set to.
arriving
04/09/2026
4 September, or 9 April
arriving
4 September 2026
one reading only
In en-GB the day comes first, so 04/09/2026 is 4 September. Under a month-first convention the same six digits are 9 April. Where a date carries a consequence, spelling the month out removes the question entirely.
A review request takes a few minutes to write. What comes back is an answer about your screens rather than these invented ones: what we would do, what it would cost in pounds sterling and how long it would take.
