The Importance of Localization Testing

As website and applications reach out to an ever-broader audience of users, it becomes increasingly important to perform thorough and extensive localization testing as part of the QA process.

Localization testing does not simply mean checking that text has been properly rendered in the correct language (although that is a big and important part of it), but also includes checking that as much of the content and design as possible have been updated to reflect how ‘things are done’ in a region.  Some values are formatted differently in different regions, such as day/date, currency, and postal codes, many languages make use of accented letters and other characters not commonly found in English-only text, and some languages even read right-to-left and may need controls positioned differently on a form to account for this (Arabic and Hebrew in particular).

Additionally, localization testing needs to be performed robustly in all supported environments, including desktop, mobile, and popular web browsers.