My knee-jerk instinct was to respond with 'but what about UIs in other languages?' But then I checked Fastmail's solution of the same problem as Gmail's, which

My knee-jerk instinct was to respond with 'but what about UIs in other languages?' But then I checked Fastmail's solution of the same problem as Gmail's, which I have in Danish. Not because I am not comfortable with English, but I have come to appreciate when people actually bother to translate their UI to my language. And their solution is straight forward; keep a few buttons for the most common actions with an icon along with text indicating what the button does. For further commands, a dropdown is available where all the commands are merely text. Because usually the problem would have been to design a UI with interface constrains around the size of the text in English, but then »indlæs« (load) turns out to be just a little wider than your box had allocated. But keeping the flexible is the solution (and thus minimise its number).