The process of localisation disrupted my design before anything else.

I figured that the difficulty in internationalizing German would be the language itself. It hasn't been. My translation was just fine. My buttons... Not so much.

"Save" is four characters. "Speichern" is nine. The fixed width of my buttons shrinks it to "Speicher...", which looks like a broken word instead of a truncated one. That's true of six other button captions, including a navigation item whose length caused the entire header to drop 20 pixels lower on the page.

If I had run tests using any other, longer language in the early design stages, all seven of those would have popped up.

Nowadays, what I do is test the app in German once a week locally, even though I can't really speak it very well. Bad layout will show no matter whether you know what you're reading.

Has anyone else found a simpler way to do this? Creating a pseudo-locale that automatically stretches all strings sounds like the obvious way, but I haven't seen anyone do it yet.