The Three Hares of Linguistic Testing

The Alconost company told App2Top.ru about the scary, at first glance, term “linguistic testing”, as well as why it is needed and how it should be applied.

High—quality localization of any product — be it a website, software, smartphone app or console game - is impossible without linguistic testing.

Linguistic testing is a procedure for checking a localized product by a translator and correcting identified errors.

In other words, the work does not end with the translation of resource files, and the localized product must be tested in real conditions. How to do it? To begin with, you will have to “kill three birds with one stone".

Kill three birds with one stone

Linguistic testing has three goals at the same time.

Task one: identify problems with the interface display in different language versions of the OS. After all, sometimes it turns out that the text encoding or the font used are missing the necessary characters (diacritics, special characters, and so on).

A striking example is that in an early version of the localization of the game, the French language lost the letter é and acquired y instead. It is unlikely that French-speaking users of the application would be happy with such a "gift".

The second task is to find lines in the translation that take up more space than they are allocated, for example, those that begin to go beyond the interface elements (headers, menus, panels). Russian Russian is 10-15% shorter than German, and Russian is 15-20% shorter than German, as we have already described in the previous material for App2top readers, equivalent turns of speech and words differ in length in different languages. Localization into Asian languages using hieroglyphs can add headaches to the translator — only a few graphemes of the Chinese language will correspond to long phrases in European languages. You may need to change the font size (so that, in the case of translation into Chinese, the text is clearly distinguishable) or shorten the translation (in the case of translation from Chinese into European languages). There's nothing you can do — beauty requires sacrifice, and if you don't pay due attention to the size and length of the labels, the interface will look bad.

The third task is to make sure that the translation corresponds to the context. This problem is most acute when localizing games. It is worth "forgetting" about testing, and the end user may find that the text does not correspond to the situation in the game. This is due to the fact that the translator often only guesses what the context is — there is only a working file with lines in front of him, and even the customer's comments cannot always clarify the situation. Testing is necessary to make sure that the female character is not spoken of in the masculine gender, "tables" when translated from English have not turned into "tables", and "blades" into "razors". By the way, this also applies to other mobile applications — without testing, it is impossible to say definitely what, for example, was meant by the word views — "views", "views" or the verb "to watch"? Such shortcomings must be found and corrected.

Linguistic testing (ideally)

How do we make it:

Let's imagine that the first part of localization is completed — all the necessary lines have been translated, and the customer has implemented them into his product.

Let's move on to the next step. Ideally, the localized product is now submitted for verification to test translators, who view screen after screen, checking all available texts. The attentive reader was probably surprised by the "ideally" clause. Why is that?

Because it is not always possible to get a product for linguistic testing — sometimes the translator does not have the devices or OS necessary to launch the product, and the client does not have the opportunity to provide access to it in any other way. In this case, the client has to take screenshots of everything that is possible and send them to the tester.

But not only interface elements are subject to verification. Linguistic testing means that all possible texts will be checked, including error messages, notifications, hints, documentation pages and "Help".

Having found an error, the tester opens the translation file and makes edits, and then unsubscribes about his discovery in the bug list, which is needed, first of all, by the client - there he can see the results of the work: what exactly was discovered and how it was fixed. Common mistakes include fragments of text for which there is no translation, incorrect data format (especially relevant for dates, times and numbers), incorrect order of first and last names.

But most of the problems are usually caused not even by errors, but by long lines that do not fit entirely into a modal window (dialog box) or menu item, and therefore are cut off or get out of their allotted area. We have to look for other translation options or, if that didn't help, make sacrifices and shorten the text. As a last resort, you can simply leave the word in the original language, but this is only possible if a commonly used term is used that does not need to be translated.

How to do linguistic testing well and quickly?

Firstly, in order to conduct linguistic testing as quickly and easily as possible, it is important to simplify and automate the translation work. At Alconost, we use the achievements of modern technologies for this: automated translation systems (among the most famous are SDL Trados, OmegaT, Poedit, MemoQ), as well as cloud platforms (GetLocalization, Google Translator Toolkit, Webtranslateit and others).

Thanks to them, several localizers and editors can work on the translation at the same time. In addition, such systems make it possible to use the so-called "translation memory". In a nutshell, the program remembers the translation of each word or phrase and subsequently, when they occur again in the text, offers them ready-made translation options. This helps to maintain the uniformity of translation and greatly simplifies linguistic testing.

Secondly, a good way to seriously simplify the work of the tester is to draw up a competent technical task, from which it will be clear how to access all available texts, including hidden ones. This applies to notifications, error messages, prize levels, subscription sections, and so on. If the localization of the game is being tested, it is worth informing the translator of the cheat codes so that he can not waste time completing each level. This will reduce the likelihood that the translator will miss a block of text, a menu, or even an entire screen (relevant for complex and voluminous products).

Thirdly, only professional translators, for whom this language is their native language, are able to conduct linguistic testing flawlessly. Of course, it is desirable that those for whom the language is their native language also do the translation. But if this is not possible, you need to make sure that at least a native speaker will be engaged in linguistic testing. Only he will be able to take into account all the subtleties of meaning, carefully preserve the context and edit phrases that are too long, while ensuring perfect translation quality.

About the company: Alconost Translations is an international company engaged in localization and linguistic testing of software, games, websites, and mobile applications. It was founded in 2004.