LOCALIZATION TESTING & IT’S BEST PRACTICES

What is Localization Testing?

Localization testing is performed to verify the quality of a product’s localization for a particular target culture/locale and is executed only on the localized version of the product.

Things to know, before you start-

In localization testing, an application behaves as expected whether it is for desktop, mobile or online distribution and its process assures the translation accuracy in context after completion of translated text into the user interface, it’s time for testers to take call for application for test drive.
Testing estimate required for the product depends on the number of dialog boxes/pages to review and on the word count with experienced based testing for localization. Localization involves translation of the app into the local country languages and an ability for the user to see and post content as per various languages or location.
Testing efforts based depend on requirements and complexity of localization feature. Test data provided to Testers should be in detail to get exhaustive and high level test cases from QA Team. There are situations where you may want to do ad-hoc testing, however, formal testing is a necessary step to safeguard quality. Remember, in localization QA, testers have to repeat the same functions according to number of languages. Following Test strategy is better approach to ensure all of them tested the entire product or not.
Due to rapid change in market trends, we need to follow agile methodology to meet the changing requirements and incremental testing approach to localization testing followed by sprint cycle of 2-3 weeks. Frequent validation required for new features across multiple languages and platforms before proceeding for a release. It’s important to be familiar of business goals from localization view. I would like to categorize into: Frequent releases in less time framework, Incremental Testing approach to increase localization efforts, Rapid Development approach for new features.

While deciding the scope of testing, these goals create the following challenges for team:

• While balancing the coverage for functionality ensuring increased test coverage on the new features.
• Validate User location- ( Location which is stored during registration and will be mapped with content location)
• Maintaining re-usability of tests across various platform variants
• Ascertaining test accuracy across repetitive scenarios on multiple languages
• Make sure of faster execution to uncover defects early on
• Validate all the features working as per expectation on supported platforms and locales
• Ensure application is working fine with different versions of the released product.
• Validate optimized test coverage on all platform variants and supported locales.

Localization Testing – Characteristics:

• Affected modules such as UI and content
• Modules specific to region-specific, Culture/locale-specific and language-specific.
• Critical Business Scenarios Testing
• Upgradation and Installation tests run in the localized environment
• Plan compatibility tests for hardware and application according to the product’s target region.
Localization Testing – UI Testing:
• Check for Error messages, resource attributes and linguistic errors
• Typographical errors
• Validate display environment standards
• Usability testing of the User interface
• Validate cultural appropriateness of UI such as colour, design, etc

TIPS & TRICKS:

• For testing application setup a suitable Test environment
• Follow the correct translation.
• Start testing with static elements.
• Follow the correct translation.(You can refer language translation document shared by client and Google translate for verification for sentence)
• Pay attention to the toast messages and error messages.
• Ensure that data entry can be done in terms of Localization.