I’m working on converting text from English to Italian using Google Sheets translation features. The translation works fine but I need to make sure each translated text doesn’t go over 200 characters because of platform restrictions.
How can I set up a character limit so the translation stops at 200 characters max?
Right now I’m using a lookup function to get the English text but I keep getting this error message: “Wrong number of arguments to IFERROR. Expected between 1 and 2 arguments, but got 3 arguments.”
u could try wraping your GOOGLETRANSLATE function in a LEFT function like this: =LEFT(IFERROR(GOOGLETRANSLATE(HLOOKUP(B2,'Data Sheet'!A:Z,8,FALSE),"en","it"),""),200) - that way it will limit the chars to 200 and fix the error.
Your IFERROR syntax looks fine - the error’s probably coming from somewhere else in your sheet. I’ve hit similar character limit issues with social media translations. Instead of truncating after translation, I truncate the source text first since translation lengths vary wildly between languages. Try =IFERROR(GOOGLETRANSLATE(LEFT(HLOOKUP(B2,'Data Sheet'!A:Z,8,FALSE),150),"en","it"),"") instead. I use 150 characters on the English side because Italian usually runs longer. This way you won’t get cut off mid-word in your final translation - looks way more professional than just chopping at 200 characters.
Been there with translation workflows at scale. Manual formula juggling gets messy when you’re dealing with character limits across languages.
Skip the nested Google Sheets functions - automate this instead. Set up a workflow that pulls your source text, checks character count, translates it, then trims to exactly 200 characters without breaking words.
You can batch process hundreds of entries, handle multiple language pairs, and add smart logic that detects when translations might exceed limits before processing. Plus you get proper error handling instead of cryptic formula errors.
I’ve used this for localizing product catalogs - saves hours compared to managing complex spreadsheet formulas. You can add features like automatic retries for failed translations or splitting long text into segments.
Check out Latenode for this kind of translation automation: https://latenode.com
I’ve hit this same issue translating product descriptions for our multilingual catalog. Italian runs 15-20% longer than English, so character limits get messy fast. Instead of dealing with cut-off text, I check the source length first and split long entries into multiple cells. Try =IF(LEN(HLOOKUP(B2,'Data Sheet'!A:Z,8,FALSE))>150,"Text too long",IFERROR(GOOGLETRANSLATE(HLOOKUP(B2,'Data Sheet'!A:Z,8,FALSE),"en","it"),"")) to catch entries that’ll blow past your 200 character limit. Saves tons of manual checking and prevents those awkward mid-sentence chops that make translations look terrible.