Multilingual application testing. Locale

Сoncept of multilingualism and locale

Multilingual applications are programs that support two or more interface languages.

Now, in the era of globalization, almost everything is translated into several languages – posters, banners, road signs, indexes in museums, etc. Although it would seem that almost everyone today speaks English, it often happens that a person only has access to his native language.

In the field of IT, websites, games, applications for mobile devices and PCs can be multilingual. Testing the correctness of translation and language aspects is called localization testing.

Not only text translation is important in multilingual applications, but also locale. Let's consider this concept.

Locale is a regional standard, a set of user interface settings. The locale includes: the language of the program, display of date and time, time zones, units of measurement, the order of writing the last name, first name, and other features.

Thus, testing multilingual applications already becomes something more than just comparing words in different languages.

Testing multilingual applications

If when testing multilingual applications you take into account the locale check, then there are a lot of points for testing. Let's consider the most frequent checks that should be carried out in this case.

1. Language support

Before testing the translation itself, it is necessary to check whether different languages are supported by the application. You can determine this in several ways: by IP address, geolocation, selected region in the device, by site address (for web applications), select in program options, etc. The application must take into account all these cases and correctly choose the display language.

There can be several errors:

• the default language of the application remains (usually English) and it does not change to the selected one after choosing it;
• the selected language is displayed in the form of squares, incomprehensible symbols or all elements are completely empty – this is an error in coding;
• instead of the selected language, the text is translated into any other, and no matter what language you choose, the desired one is simply nowhere to be found.

Today, most applications have multiple languages for translation. Based on the number of speakers and their popularity, they are English, Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, Arabic, Japanese and Korean.

Development companies try to focus on this information and not lose potential customers, given their number.

2. Correctness of the translation

A common problem is that translators who do not know the language well choose a different meaning of the word and shock the user, forcing him to guess the meaning of the button himself. For example, the word «follow», in addition to «subscribe», has several other meanings, so phrases like «Follow us" or «Accompany us» can be found on the site.

But it is important not only to translate the sentence correctly, but also to adapt its meaning to a specific language and nationality. Many problems for developers are caused by the presence of different types in some languages. They have to duplicate the phrase in the code depending on the gender of the user, and also take into account that not only nouns have their own gender, but also adjectives and verbs are inflected differently.

There are cases when, after choosing a language other than English in the application, there are still untranslated elements next to the words of the selected language. It is even worse when you see several languages and it turns out to be a kind of Babylon, where everything is mixed up and the user cannot understand the application. In this case, the company will definitely lose its customers.

3. Correspondence of the size of the translated text

Do not forget that the same word has different lengths in different languages. Accordingly, the application must either change the length of the element or the size of the font, otherwise the text will go beyond the button, be cut off or overlap with the adjacent text. At the same time, changing the font should not affect the readability of the phrase. It is better to sacrifice accurate content and adapt the text in a different way than to leave an accurate translation but users will not be able to understand what is written.

4. Translation of static pictures

In some applications, there are banners or pictures that also have inscriptions. Therefore, applications must contain duplicates of these images, but with text in supported languages.

5. Text direction

This item refers to those languages that are not written in the usual way for us from left to right, but from right to left. These are, for example, Arabic and Hebrew. Testers need to take this factor into account, as such writing is important for residents of these countries.

6. Relevant references

If you choose the Portuguese language in the application, it means that you cannot send the user to the Polish version of the page, let's say, Wikipedia. The same applies to links to other resources that are embedded by the development company itself, and not by advertising.

7. Name display standards

You should not forget about the order of displaying the surname and first name in different languages. In Ukrainian, it is customary to indicate the surname first, and then the first name (Shevchenko Maria) and in English it is the other way around (Maria Shevchenko).

This also applies to the number of characters for the name. For example, in South Korea, the full name consists mostly of three syllables, so registration forms on many sites and applications limit the entry of the name to three characters.

8.Currency display standards

Even currencies in different countries are displayed differently. The position of this symbol can be before or after the numerical value, and the decimal and thousands separator can be displayed as a dot, comma, or space, depending on the country.

Below is a table showing currencies from different countries as an example.

9.Date and time display standards

Also, from locale standards, it is worth paying attention to whether the date and time of the country whose language was selected is displayed in the correct format.

In the date, in addition to the order of the day, month and year, the separators between them also differ. There are more than 10 date formats, but here are the 5 most commonly used ones.

As for the time format, the French 24-hour standard is adopted almost all over the world. However, countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand use the English 12-hour system.

10. Punctuation display standards

Everyone knows that in the Ukrainian and Russian languages a space is placed after the comma, not before, there is only one exclamation mark in a sentence – at the end, and there is a hyphen between some compound words. However, each language has its own rules regarding punctuation marks and their display. Below are screenshots of punctuation features in some languages.

Quotation marks exist in all languages, but look like national costumes in different ways.

11. Conversion of measures and monetary units

Almost all countries use the same standards of measurement – kilometers, meters, liters, kilograms. But, for example, in the United States, the system is completely different, people there use miles, gallons, feet and inches. Therefore, sometimes in applications you can choose English for a specific country, while all units of measurement and their values must be translated for a specific region.

The same applies to monetary units. If this is an online store, then the application must have a currency converter connected, which will change not only the currency display, as described in the eighth point, but also convert monetary units according to the exchange rate.

Testing multilingual applications, there are many different checks to be performed. In this article, the main ones were named, but this is not all that can be applied. It is important to remember that there are many languages and countries in the world, each of which has its own characteristics and cultural aspects. Localization testing is a difficult and painstaking work that takes a lot of testers' time, but for a development company, multilingual applications are an excellent chance to enter the global market and gain recognition from a large number of users.