All text that appears in the user interface must be translated. English text is almost always shorter than its translations. Design the elements of your user interface that display text so that there is room for the text strings to grow. Create dialogs, menus, status bars, and other user interface elements that display text so that they can easily display longer strings. Avoid abbreviations—they do not exist in languages that use ideographic characters. 

Short strings tend to grow in translation more than long phrases. The following table provides a rough estimate of how much expansion you should plan for given the length of your English strings:  

Estimating string lengths