A system and method is provided to map alternative short captions that are displayed in a constrained display environment instead of displaying standard captions. When designing a display panel, the designer identifies shorter captions to use in a constrained environment. Shorter captions are helpful in preventing text from wrapping or having to horizontally scroll to in order to read a longer caption. Varying levels of short captions are provided so that a standard size display displays the full caption, a somewhat smaller size display displays smaller captions, while an even smaller display displays even smaller captions. National language support is also provide to translate both full captions as well as the short version(s) of the captions.