By the way, I can't stress enough the need for a way to see the strings in an emulated UI as mentioned earlier in the thread. A lot of people that have never worked within localization on smaller formats such as cell phones don't realize how much MORE screen real estate is used by translations in comparison to the original English strings.

I've worked on 10 different games for cell phone platforms which were translated into about 15 different languages and 6 or 7 encodings. Just because English fits there doesn't mean other languages will.

As a general guideline, French strings will be anywhere from 50% to 80% longer per string and German is between 80% and 120% longer per string. (Germans seem to enjoy joining together multiple words into one long 20 character word for some reason.) Most of the other languages shouldn't be as long.

None of my work projects had the ability to directly view strings in our game UI, unfortunately.. so it meant we had long periods of going back and forth from testers to localization until each string worked. Let's not allow that to happen in Maemo, please.