Localization testing is a software or web application testing procedure designed to ensure the performance of the application and evaluate its different aspects. The behavior of software is tested for specific languages, regions, and cultures. The goal of doing localization testing is to test the linguistic and cultural aspects of specific modules. Localization testing mainly focuses on the content and UI elements of a website.
Introduction
Localization is the process of converting web and app content from one form (text content) to another (a different language), making applications more accessible to users by addressing language barriers.
Multilanguage websites help users to better connect with products, but creating such a website is difficult and time-consuming. Tolgee offers a simple way to create multilingual content. It’s an open source localization tool that makes it easy for you—no matter which framework your website is built on—to convert web content into another language with just a few clicks.
What is localization?
Localization is the process of translating your application into new regions and adding support for local languages. This can be done through a combination of translation and enhancement to take into account cultural and linguistic differences between regions. Users tend to prefer content in their own languages, so localization can help you reach out to new audiences.
The localization testing process is a testing approach that targets a particular region, country or area—and seeks to examine how the application functions in that particular region. The goal of localization testing is to ensure the product must be linguistically acceptable for those regions and languages in mind.
What is Localization Testing?
Localization testing is a software or web application testing procedure designed to ensure the performance of the application and evaluate its different aspects. The behavior of software is tested for specific languages, regions, and cultures. The goal of doing localization testing is to test the linguistic and cultural aspects of specific modules. Localization testing mainly focuses on the content and UI elements of a website.
Localization testing is the process of examining a product to ensure that it functions as expected for a specific culture or locale. Localization testing involves making sure that the date, time, language, region, documentation, content, and user interface are appropriate for that culture or locale.
Why Localization Testing is Important?
Localization testing is the process of validating that an application works correctly after translating and modifying it for a specific language, market or region. Localization testing ensures that all user-facing elements in the application are translated properly to the target language. It can also significantly reduce the overall cost of software applications by lowering overall support costs and reducing testing time, thereby improving the application's flexibility and scalability.
Localization testing is a process of ensuring that an application is properly adapted to function in different languages and geographic regions. The main focus of this type of testing is on content localization, user Interface (UI) translation, language adjustments, compatibility, and quality assurance. The point of using the localization testing approach is to execute more with less time and cost without increasing external support by using internal resources.
Importance of Localization Testing
So far we discussed localization and its importance, but now to get to know why it’s important and its need, do you really localize your project?
Below are the most frequent uses and the importance of localization testing.
It’s reduced all testing costs.
The assistance cost is lower.
It’s a time-saving approach, and you need to spend less time on testing.
It provides more scalability and flexibility to the applications.
Accuracy is more.
It is secure and sustainable.
Localization testing is an approach to translation that serves many purposes, improving the process as a whole. That's why it’s important that you understand how localization can be used to improve your current translation process—and what impact it might have on time, accuracy, flexibility, sustainability, and cost.
Challenges with Localization Testing
The localization testing approach involves some challenges, which are listed below. The advantages of using the third-party prebuilt tools outweigh these challenges by providing a cost-effective solution for all types applications.
A domain specialist person is required for testing.
Hiring local translation is costly.
Adding more local languages is difficult.
An experienced tester is required.
These are some possible challenges in localizing the testing approach, but we can reduce them by applying automation and prebuild tools for testing.
Why Use Tolgee?
There are many localization testing tools available today, but most are expensive, limited to a particular framework or language and/or require learning a new interface. Tolgee is an open source application that can be used to manage the localization process; it is platform-agnostic and can handle screenshots, comment translations, tag keys, and automated screenshots generation for the web.
Tolgee supports a variety of libraries and frameworks to perform localization. You can find details in Tolgee's official documentation with instructions for using each library or framework. The localization process takes more time and effort than it would, but using Tolgee can help you streamline the process and perform better localization testing at a lower cost.
How to perform localization testing in Tolgee?
To perform localization testing in tolgee, you have to connect your application with it first. This can be done by following the “How-to Integrate Tolgee into Vanilla Static HTML/JS Application” guide here on the site — which gives a basic overview of how it’s all set up and works and how to make that content accessible in other languages.
Tolgee supports multiple frameworks like React, Svelte, and Vue—and more. You can explore all the available configuration setups and API guides by visiting tolgee's official documentation!
For more information on performing localization using Tolgee, refer back to the article mentioned earlier.
The Goals of Localization Testing
Start by testing simple functions in your application.
Test the project after configuration in various regional languages.
Start testing for compact devices as well.
Regular updates on the time zones and application dates.
Start experimenting with various browsers and live devices with your application.
Start identifying linguistics checks and localization requirements.
Perform Localization Testing in Tolgee
Configure your project with tolgee by following the above share article link, then proceed with the steps below.
Navigate to the project page on the Tolgee dashboard.
Click on a project to open the project dashboard. You will get all the information about project translations, languages, members, and other details.
On the project dashboard, you can locate the Activity tab, which records all activity details.
Start testing your application with languages that you have added to translate content.
To test your application's performance, visit the Daily Activity dashboard from the project menu.
To add a new translation or integration guide while testing the application, navigate to the translation section of the Tolgee.
To test multiple base languages, select the Settings tab of the project dashboard and select which languages to test.
To start testing your application, add the first language from the Languages tab. You can also add other languages using this same process.
You can test your application with multiple machine translation services, including AWS, Google, and DeepL.
You can add translations and export them from the project dashboard. There are multiple options to export as JSON, as well as other formats. The State Review section is also available to test and target specific regions.
Tolgee supports multiple framework integrations for projects which you can choose such as React, Angular, Vue, and others.
The testing of the project is carried out in real time here. You can test your application on different types of devices and browsers, such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave, and others.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we covered how to perform the translation and localization testing, as well as when both are needed in a project. We also discussed how Tolgee can be used to easily accomplish these tasks quickly and within one place. I hope you have a sense of how Tolgee can help you test the multi-lingual quality of your web content. It is an open source tool that makes it easy to create, manage and publish content in multiple languages—and everything else about localization testing comes easily with it too!
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