QA and Testing

When applications are localized, they undergo extensive changes by many people all the way from the customer side content developers who may not have been aware of the complexities of localization when creating their source contents, to the localization team of project managers, translators, engineers, publishers, and client side reviewers. In addition, it is often the case that when localizing software or web content, the translator works out of context. For these reasons, testing is a crucial phase in the localization cycle. It is done to make sure that the deliverable is technically and linguistically accurate.

Our testing team includes testing engineers who work with customers to prepare test plans and scripts, IT engineers who work on setting up the testing environment, and testers who execute test plans and complete test reports. We currently do not have the facility to host hardware and software for testing. However, we provide several alternatives that will suit the needs of most clients. For example, we can offer the following options:

• Work on-site with your team. We will send technical and linguistic support personnel to prepare, execute, and report. If you have the facility to host these resources, this may be your best alternative as it ensures the security of you application, and allows for direct interaction between your team and our team.
• For applications and content that can be tested remotely, such as web sites, you can host the content, and we will do the rest offsite

Our test engineers have expertise in preparing test plans and scripts (manual and automated). In addition, they have worked with most of the public testing tools such as Silk, Watchfire, and W3Runner, as well as testing tools designed specifically for localization such has HtmlQA and HelpQA.

Our QA process involves the following steps:

• Source testing
• Test plan and script preparation
• Testing
• Reporting
• Debugging
• Release

A typical application undergoes between one and three cycles of testing.