Ensuring that your website is highly localized helps you increase your return on investment in this thriving market. You can do this effectively by taking advantage of numerous effective and data-driven localization website testing.
On the other hand, you can not make your website written in one language only. It must be appealing to a broader audience, and site visitors from other countries should understand your website content. Generally, websites and other web-based products are made to engage with local and international audiences. However, localization and localization testing might be challenging for new or even old website owners. Thus, most businesses prefer to deal with a localization company, or a localization testing company for appropriate services. In most cases, one company can perform both tasks.
This article talks about everything you should know about website localization testing. So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Understanding Localization Testing
Localization testing refers to checking how a website or other web product appeals to a specific culture, locale, or region. It ensures that the web product matches a particular country’s cultural and linguistic aspects, all icons and symbols are shown, and the content is translated flawlessly.
If you decide to expand your business and want to reach a broader market, you will need to localize your content. It lets you deliver features, cultural, and language nuances that encourage your target audience to browse or use your website. And localization testing is an essential element to keep in mind after the localization is done.
After all, localization testing is meant to verify a web product’s function while giving users and site visitors a more personalized experience.
The Importance Of Website Localization Testing
When you plan to expand the reach of your website, having an in-depth understanding of your target customer’s regional needs and requirements is the first step to achieving success. Global businesses and audiences will significantly benefit from the website showing that it respects, acknowledges, and recognizes the local beliefs and culture.
Thus, website localization testing is crucial as it minimizes the chances of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Aside from ensuring appropriate linguistic data, website localization testing is beneficial for ensuring correct image usage, typography, and information accessibility.
Localization testing is performed after everything has been settled. It ensures that everything on your website works correctly, for example, that pictures match the content.
By testing the website on the users’ devices end, localization testers can identify bugs, errors, and other problems that would otherwise go undetected. It enables the development team to fix any issues and ensure a smooth user experience for the localized website.
What You Should Know About Website Localization Testing
Website localization testing is essential to ensure that your website is accessible and appealing to the general audience. It checks the performance, compatibility, security, usability, and functionality of a website.
Here are some of the vital things you should know about website localization testing:
Support Components
Localization testing is designed to examine and verify the function of your website’s supporting components. Support components refer to default hotkeys, speech engines, and spelling checkers available on your website.
Font styles and whether they are compatible with various devices can significantly impact the overall user experience of your target market. Not paying attention to these components could limit your website’s capability to deliver appropriate services and products to your audience.
Since it can affect user experience, support components – like product documentation, license agreements, and other files should be tested to ensure that they can cater to a global audience.
Numerical Formats
After integrating these formats into your website, testing numerical displays, outputs, and inputs should be conducted. Remember that various countries follow different measurement units, area codes, phone numbers, currency, time, and date.
Your target audience should not encounter issues with scheduling or payments caused by syntax problems. For example, some countries have no zip code systems. It means that users from these countries may use fake data to type into this unnecessary field.
Language
Localization testing ensures that your website content has correct translation to different languages. At this stage, you may work with a native speaker of a specific language who can thoroughly examine the translation and catch semantic errors.
In line with that, using a translation engine is unnecessary and must be avoided as it comes with its drawbacks and limitations. For instance, Google Translate converts every sentence word to another language. It might not be an efficient way to localize your website and usually leads to confusion.
Aside from the language, you also need to check your website user interface elements for possible truncated or misplaced texts. Moreover, form fields, boxes, headers, and buttons should remain in one exact place according to your initial UI design. It applies in languages that follow a right-to-left reading system, including Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu.
Infrastructure
If your website requires integration with third-party APIs and software modules, these components should be tested adequately. Beyond that, you also need to test local regulation compliance that governs website installation and distribution.
Website localization testing also includes hardware checking. Your target market must easily access necessary devices and drivers, and you need to keep those connections seamless. Also, you need to be mindful of country-specific laws affecting your website’s encryption algorithm system.
When To Implement Website Localization Testing
When should you implement localization testing on your website? Some may say that it should be done during the early stage. It is a common mistake you may commit as a beginner.
Website localization testing must be done after everything has been completed. It can help you verify if the user interface is correct when used in different languages. Moreover, this process is also designed to ensure that the translation matches the content’s meaning.
Thus, it is best to perform website localization testing after completing the translation and proofreading process to ensure successful results.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, website localization testing is one of the crucial factors to consider to ensure that your web product appeals to a broader range of audiences – local or international.
Website localization testing needs the participation of a professional localization testing company or linguistic specialist. Otherwise, the target audience can quickly identify flaws in UI or language, which could adversely affect their experience using your product.