What’s the best definition of localization testing? A testing process to validate whether an application is ready to go live in a foreign market.
The requirements for marking an application as “ready” depend on your company.
It’s no different than regular software testing, really. Differences in release strategies across companies mean that some bring their product to market early on (with potentially more bugs) while others wait until it is more mature.
A Concise Definition of Localization Testing
Localization testers typically ensure it all comes together:
- linguistically, the translated content communicates your original content’s message properly to the target audience. We adjust it to regional expectations (do you use Fahrenheit or Celsius? Pounds or Kilograms?)
- cosmetically, the user interface of the localized application does not represent any problems due to the change in character sets and content (ie Arabic and Hebrew goes from right to left, and German is way longer than English)
- functionally, the application functions as expected and we adapt it to regional preferences (postal codes have letters in Canada so validate accordingly)
The weight of each category certainly depends on the product we are localizing.
The linguistic aspect will be more important in a marketing-oriented publication while testing a mobile application will require more focus on cosmetic and functional aspects.
If you want to dig deeper, you may be interested in checking out our comprehensive localization testing checklist.
Get the Best Localization Testing
Localization testing is an integral step of any localization task—whether it’s for web, a mobile app, or software.
Our localization team will perform functional, linguistic, and cosmetic validation to test your product inside out.
Our goal: to catch the bugs before your users do.
