We are working on a web application (running as intranet site not as public website) for monitoring the state of a set of machines. The application must support several languages, of which one is German.
Especially with Germen we have a lot of cases where we need to display very long words (combined words… in German multiple nouns can be combined into one word) in the UI. For example: Öffnungszeitengruppenliste.
We have two options:
- we can write the word as one, which is grammatically correct but very hard to read.
- or we can spate the words using hyphens: Öffnungszeiten-Gruppen-Liste.
The German grammar allows the second version but it is very uncommon. We are not sure which version we should use.
Is there a rule / best practice for handing long UI texts? Have you made any experience with your UIs which might help us?