Many languages are more verbose than English and require more space to hold strings or to display dialog boxes. There are cases, as with menus, where the space allocation is done dynamically, but in most cases the application has to provide the space. The following table shows the percentage of additional space that an application should allocate for non-English strings of various lengths.
| Length in characters | Additional space required |
| 1–10 | 200% |
| 11–20 | 100% |
| 21–30 | 80% |
| 31–50 | 60% |
| 51–70 | 40% |
| 70+ | 30% |
In the English version of your application, avoid creating dense menus where most of the available space (all except one line, for example) is used. Dialog boxes should be designed so that items can be moved freely, allowing reorganization of the contents as translation demands. Do not crowd status bars with information. Even abbreviations are often longer in other languages.