You’ve localized your product, but you know it’s not the last step, right? Before the final release of your product, you need to double-check that everything works perfectly.
According to the research, 44% of users may miss out on critical information if the content isn’t delivered in their local language. Localization testing helps you check that translation is not only done but also corresponds to all the cultural and regional peculiarities. As every business wants their clients to understand them and avoid misunderstandings, including localization testing services in your workflow is a wise step.
However, location testing remains to be an underestimated activity for many companies. And yet you must include this process in the development cycle. Let’s take a closer look at what localization testing is, its essential steps, and why it is needed.
What Is Localization Testing?
Localization testing is a check of the content of an application, website, or any other software for compliance with linguistic and cultural requirements and the specifics of a particular country or region.
The main goal of localization testing is to make your product feel native to the target audience. People want to feel that you’ve created this product specifically for them and in their language, culture, and traditions. Yes, most of those who speak English well still prefer to surf the web in their native language if given a choice. Thus, localization testing should be one of the priorities from the very beginning.
Let’s look at the most important things to consider while testing localization.
1. Plan your Localization Testing
We don’t need to say that planning testing is one of the main steps to make it effective. You need to include localization testing services in your development cycle and workflow from the very beginning.
You can start planning testing by answering these questions:
- What is our testing scope?
- How many languages will we test?
- What are our testing requirements?
- What software will be used for testing?
- What tools do we need for testing?
- Do we have the required documentation and resources, like glossaries and test cases for the testers?
If it’s the first test, you must test every feature and word. However, if you’ve added a new feature or updated some content, we recommend you concentrate on this core feature and check it without testing the old one again.
2. Who is Going to Test it?
Before testing, you need to decide who will be responsible for it. There are several options: freelancers, an in-house team, or a professional localization agency.
All of these options will work great. However, we recommend choosing an agency to get excellent quality for a reasonable amount. Usually, localization testers are linguists with experience in localization testing of particular software products. The critical point is that localization agencies usually use modern translation management systems (TMS), which help automate many processes and take localization to a new level.
Another option is to ask your community to test your translated product. The users from your target region can say what words don’t sound natural and where you can use some slang to sound like their native mate. To motivate them, you can give a discount on your product.
Also, communicating with your community will give you precious feedback. At the same time, you’ll be able to connect with your audience and make them more loyal to your brand.
So, you can combine professional localization services with community testing. You won’t lose anything trying to do this — the chances are you’ll gain a lot.
3. Internationalization is a Must
Internationalization is not just an intelligent tech word. It’s what makes your localization process smooth. Internationalization is designing and developing your product in a way that enables easy localization for any culture, region, or language.
Internationalization is essential to:
- support bidirectional text
- support vertical text or other non-Latin typographic features
- support various date and time formats, numeric formats, sorting, and address displaying format
- adapt texts with more extensive lengths without distorting the alignment
Today, Unicode has become a new foundation of internationalization. It helps to internationalize your code to handle the requirements of all the needed markets simultaneously. Using Unicode can help avoid the complexities of different character code architectures, as it encodes all the known symbols in the world into a single unified database.
Internationalization helps a lot in functionality testing. If your website or app is internationalized, it will be easy to check:
- the fundamental functionality of the localized product
- work of hyperlinks in all language versions
- correct display of special characters in different languages
- the smooth functioning of input features
- work of hotkeys, sorting of lists, fonts, and format separators
4. What about UI/UX?
During testing, it’s vital to check both the content itself for correctness and how it looks on your users’ screens.
For example, Japanese texts take up more horizontal space than English ones. Thus, you need to check that all the texts fit the buttons and don’t go through them.
Also, it’s essential to check the visuals in your product. Your pictures should look native to every market. Choosing native images will help to increase audience loyalty. Here is an example of Adidas and how it localizes its websites for different regions.
Image source: Adidas websites
Thus, during localization testing, don’t forget to check the visuals and the texts on the screens whether it fits the screens in all the languages
5. Automate Where Possible
Automating localization testing is a wise strategy to save time.
Test automation has the following advantages: a significant reduction in costs and time compared to resource-intensive manual testing, especially when there are a lot of locales.
To automate localization testing, create automated test scripts to make the localization testing faster. You must choose the automation tool to write scripts, create a scenario to be tested, and then write scripts according to it.
Also, remember that combining automation with manual testing is always a good practice for better accuracy
Wrapping Up
Localization is not finished without localization testing. It’s a vital element before release which assures that your product will behave according to the requirements for the language and market you need.
Test your localized content before releasing it: it will help find the errors and misleadings. Otherwise, your users will do it for you, harming your brand’s reputation.