Custom Labels - Working around their limits

Question

My team is currently undergoing a discussion related to adding support for more languages using salesforce's custom labels. I've used custom labels before but am a little concerned about the limits.

You can create up to 5,000 custom labels for your organization, and they can be up to 1,000 characters in length. Custom labels from managed packages don’t count toward this limit.

If by any chance we run out of custom labels(we want to support many languages) is it sustainable to use managed packages to store them in there and work around the limit this way?

What should one do if there's a need for a label that is longer than 1000 chars? Is there a best practice related to this, maybe break it down in 2 separate labels?

Answer 1

Each label can have a translation for each language in your org. That means that if you have a label Hello_World, you can translate it in English, Spanish, Japanese, etc and it only counts as one label. 1,000 characters is approximately a decent paragraph of text (about 1/2 of a printed page), so if you need more than that, use more than one label. It is highly unlikely you'd need more than 5,000 labels, but if you absolutely needed to, you could use a managed package, but that would make your code base a bit more difficult to maintain.