Testing tools for i18n application

Question

Hi All,

Any suggestion for a tool to test internationalized/ localized application? The application's UI is through web interface. The localized strings are stored in xml files.

Best regards

Answer 1

I'm not sure what exactly you want to test, but for a desktop application I'm working on some of the translatable strings are for use in menu's. These strings may contain keyboard shortcuts, e.g.: "Open\tCtrl-O". We need to include the keyboard shortcut since Ctrl-O might need to be translated to some other keyboard shortcut in another language. However, some translators would (not on purpose of course) introduce bugs. For example, they would include a space between \t and Ctrl-O or they would translate the "Ctrl". Our solution was to create a small number of unit tests and run these on every English string-translated string combination for every language. So that's a lot of tests (over 50000 in our case) but they run very fast (10 seconds or so) since it's mostly just string comparisons.

We test for things like:

• No spaces between \t and the keyboard shortcut,
• If there is a keyboard shortcut in the English string, there should be one in the translation as well,
• If the English string has no line breaks, neither should the translation,
• If the English string ends with '...' (signalling a menu item that opens a dialog) the translation should end with '...' as well.

I hope this is still useful as you are talking about a web application and my experience is with a desktop application.