[mudetroit]

Yeah using German translations is a well known simple strategy to see how your site handles longer word length, because of the language characteristics.

It will do a good job of pointing out places where you haven't built in adequate flexibility for longer words. It's not perfect of course, there are times when a translated word is shorter, but it is a nice real world test of the basic flexibility of your page layout.

[SeriousM]

Spanish is also a very good choice for testing. I used it to see if a POS Terminal can handle the translations on small screens.