Localization Testbenches, Part I

What are you using to test your localized products? If you're handing them to your domestic QA team and expecting that they'll intuitively test them with correct language locale settings, you may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

Of course, your testers need to have some tolerance for the extraordinary circumstance of not being able to read what they're testing. Testers with this level of tolerance have not been that easy to hire in single-language countries - which is one explanation for the success of globalization - but they do not take quite so much umbrage at it now that the writing is on the wall and the tools are more handy.

Also, there are two levels of testing: linguistic and functional. You do not need (or want) your domestic QA team to review the Italian translation; you want the translators to review it, and by the time you're handing your product to your QA team, linguistic review should be long since ended. In most cases, your QA team will know how to perform functional testing much more efficiently than the translators will, even though the UI is foreign. Encourage them to overcome the "How can I test this when I can't read it?" obstacle, either with your own evangelization, or with gentle, paycheck-indexed prodding from above. They have more value to add to the localization QA process than they suspect.

In this series, you'll read about testing 1) Software; 2) Web sites; and 3) Help files.