Localization Testing

Ministry of Testing

Localization could mean different things to different people:

• Translating text, including using characters not in the pre-localization version of the software

• Text direction

• Formatting dates, times, numbers, money amounts

• Calendars

• Time zones, leaving/entering daylight saving

• Currencies - conversion between them, possibly having >1 per user or business entity e.g. a discount of $50 across a EUR account and a GBP account

• Tax

• Etc.

-- Anonymous

Suggestion 1: To add more context to my original question - was give a series of Chinese and Japanese text translation for a site and need to figure out how to ensure the text remains the same through the user experience on the site.

e.g. Chinese and Japanese. Things like Chinese need multi-byte characters e.g. UTF8. If the code was originally built on single-byte characters, some of the conversion to multi-byte might be missed. The places where this is most likely to show up is where text is split or joined together. E.g. given name + family name (stored separately in e.g. db.) => whole name.

Suggestion 2: Also, don't use long strings (say 50 characters) with no spaces. I've seen a lot of people do this and it's just not realistic (With one possible exception if you're from Anglesey where technically you could use 'Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch', but everybody shortens it anyway, for obvious reasons...)

Suggestion 3: from what I experienced, when doing i18n (lets only talk about translations, not formatting dates, etc) it's easy to define your phrases and use a service (e.g. https://poeditor.com/) or a local app to translate them into different languages. these tools show your translation progress and give warnings about text length. So not much risk there. My approach to QA would be to do automatic screenshots of key areas in different locales and let a human look through them and giving a when they see something weird. The quality of the translation (correct, correct tone, displayed where it makes sense) is another beast.

Reference:

9 Tips on Localization Testing - WonderProxy BlogWonderProxy