German is often the first language a team adds after English, and the first one that breaks the screenshots. The headline that held one line in English wraps to two; the CTA stops looking like a button; the layout that was fine because it was fine in English is suddenly the thing deciding which German sentence can ship.
The “~30% longer” shorthand is a word-count rule of thumb. Andiamo!'s expansion table lists German at +10% to +35% from English — by word count, not by pixel width. Width is what a screenshot cares about, and width is per string: every pair below was measured in the editor's own box, with the renderer's Inter build, through the same fit engine the product runs.
Where the extra width comes from
Compound nouns become one unbreakable word
German builds a single word where English uses two or three: Notification settings is Benachrichtigungseinstellungen. At the same font size the German word measures +60.1% wider. The editor wraps at spaces, so that word is one unit: there is no space to break at, and if the compound is wider than the box the fit loop can only keep shrinking the type. At the floor it stops — and if the word is still wider than the box there, the editor reports the overflow.
CTAs get a verb phrase, not a verb
Download now becomes Jetzt herunterladen — +33.4% wider in the same face. In a sentence, separable verbs also split — herunterladen becomes laden … herunter — so a short English button can turn into a clause. Keep the CTA an imperative and keep it on one line; a CTA that wraps to two lines reads as body copy.
du or Sie — pick one and keep it
English has one you. German forces a register on every line: Starte deine kostenlose Testphase (informal) or Starten Sie Ihre kostenlose Testphase (formal). Both are correct; mixing them across a screenshot set is not. Consumer apps usually use du, finance, health and B2B products usually use Sie. Choose once, then hold it across headlines, captions, buttons and the store listing — the formal form is also the longer one, because it carries the pronoun and the verb ending.
Line breaks follow the spaces, not your layout
The editor wraps German at spaces and keeps any hard line break you typed; it never re-wraps a hard break to save a line. Hyphens inside a compound do not create a break point in the fit engine, so Screenshot-Bearbeitung stays one unit until it fits. That gives you three practical rules: keep every CTA on one line, avoid leaving a single word on the last line, and rewrite a compound the type has to squeeze rather than relying on a break that will not happen.
Not every string grows. Continue is Weiter — −28.1% in the same face. That is why an average expansion factor cannot tell you whether a particular headline fits; only the string in its box can.
Three examples, measured in the editor’s box
All three use the editor's new-text defaults on the iPhone 16 Pro Max canvas (1320 × 2868): a 1120 × 80 px text box at 48 px Inter SemiBold, line height 1.2. The font size, the line breaks and the verdicts come from the fit function the editor, the export worker and the free text-fit checker all run. The three pairs are also preset examples in that checker, so you can reproduce every one of them.
A short headline
Longer, but still one line at the authored size — auto-fit does nothing.
A longer sentence
One line only after the fit loop steps the type down — above the floor, so no warning.
A full sentence
A translator expanded a three-word tagline into a sentence. Two lines at the floor still need more height than the box has, so the editor flags it.
These are measurements of these strings in this box — not a prediction for your copy. A different font size, box width or sentence moves every number.
The three checks before export
1. The auto-fit floor
Auto-fit steps the size down from the size you set in 2% steps and stops at 70% of it. A line can therefore end up at 70% of its authored size without any warning. Below that the editor stops shrinking and reports the overflow instead. If German only fits below the floor, the translation is too long for the layout; shortening the copy is the fix, not smaller type.
2. Per-locale font size
The German headline rarely needs the same size as the English one. On Pro, each text layer stores geometry per locale — font size, box width and offsets — so German can be set smaller or wider without moving the Japanese line. The editor shows the controls on every plan; a Free export ignores stored overrides, so what a Free account previews is what it ships.
3. The overflow warning
When a translation still does not fit at 70%, the Localize panel says so on that text layer and the translation list badges the locale: Text still overflows at the 70% legibility floor — exports will clip it. The Check step lists overflowing copy before export, alongside untranslated lines and placeholder text, and its advice is the right one: shorten the translation or widen the box. Treat any overflow as a rewrite.
What to change in the German first
- Shorten the sentence, not the font. The overflow example above fits on one line as Alles an einem Ort — the same promise, without the relative clause and the adverbial tail.
- Use infinitives for CTAs. Jetzt testen and Kostenlos starten are shorter than a full sentence with a pronoun.
- Say du or Sie once per line. Repeating the pronoun in a headline adds width without adding meaning.
- Choose the shorter natural compound. If the screen already says which settings it shows, Einstellungen beats Benachrichtigungseinstellungen.
- Check the longest string in the set. The locale that overflows is the one with the longest line, not the one with the average line.
Before you export: the checklist
- German copy measured in its own box, not derived from the English width.
- No German line sitting below the 70% auto-fit floor.
- No overflow warning left in the Check step.
- Every CTA on one line.
- One register — du or Sie — across every screen and the listing.
- Compounds read as words a German speaker would use, not literal translations.
- Every iPhone size class you ship checked, not just the largest one.
Text is only half the upload. The file bytes are the other half — alpha, palette colour, colour profile, the 8 MB ceiling, exact slot pixels — and they have their own checklist.
Numbers in this article
The ~30% estimate. Andiamo!'s expansion table lists German at +10% to +35% from English by word count (andiamo.co.uk, accessed 2026-10-29). The 30% in the title is the common shorthand for that range; it is an estimate, and a word-count one — not a pixel measurement.
The measured percentages. Every “measured width” figure is an advance-width comparison at the same font size, computed with the product's own Inter build and the editor's fit function. They describe the exact strings shown, in the exact box shown; your copy, size and box will give different numbers. The three headline pairs are preset examples in the free text-fit checker, where you can reproduce them in one click.
Localizing a whole listing by hand is its own problem — see why hand-localized screenshots stop scaling.