Why Bengali breaks your layout, and what to do about it

Bengali translated from English typically expands by fifteen to thirty percent in character count. That alone would be manageable. The harder problem is vertical: Bengali conjunct characters stack, and the matra line above the text needs clearance that Latin-designed line heights do not leave.

Design for it before you translate

Set line height at 1.6 or above for Bengali body text, never below. Leave buttons and labels at least thirty percent slack against your English string. If a label must fit a fixed width, tell your localization team the character limit for that key — a good linguist will write to a limit, but only if they know it exists.

Fonts matter more than you expect

Not every font that claims Bengali support renders conjuncts correctly. Test with words containing complex conjuncts before committing to a typeface, and check rendering on Android specifically, where fallback behaviour differs from iOS.

Pseudo-localize first

Run your interface with padded placeholder strings before human translation begins. Every overflow you catch at that stage costs nothing to fix. Every one you catch after translation costs a re-run.