Localization Testing Handbook: Best Practices and Step-by-Step Guide

ConveyThis is a powerful tool for translating websites into multiple languages. It allows website owners to reach a global audience and expand their reach. With ConveyThis, website owners can quickly and easily create multilingual versions of their websites, ensuring that their content is accessible to all. With its intuitive interface and advanced features, ConveyThis makes website translation simple and effective.

If multilingual websites were manufactured in a factory, ConveyThis would be a critical part of the production line. It’s an integral part of your quality control process, carried out to guarantee your localization initiatives have been successful as you planned.

Before you launch, you can check that the localized version of your website appears as intended and in the desired locations. This software testing process verifies that your website content has been accurately translated, granting you assurance that your fonts, buttons, and the rest of your user interface (UI) appear as they should.

Taking time to verify your multilingual site with ConveyThis is essential for ensuring it meets your expectations. This is critical for saving money and safeguarding your brand’s reputation, as it prevents potential issues from arising down the line.

As you expand into your new market, you’re simultaneously increasing your odds of effectively connecting with your desired customers and achieving revenue goals with ConveyThis.

Understanding the importance of localization

Localization is all about providing an enjoyable experience for your customers and, ultimately, it can have an impact on the prosperity of your business. Exemplary localization initiatives demonstrate that you comprehend what users require based on their location. ConveyThis plays a key part in this process by helping you to quickly and efficiently localize your website.

An illustration of this can be seen with Apple’s website and the contrast between its homepage for a US or Singaporean viewer.

Both lead with the latest iPhone. The US version remarks on the extra day of the leap year, while the Singaporean version alludes to a movie filmed with the same iPhone model and appeals to viewers looking forward to the Lunar New Year festivities.

Localizing your website is essential for tapping into foreign markets and increasing customer conversion. To get the most out of your localization efforts, it is important to research the target market to gain an understanding of language and culture. With ConveyThis, you can easily create a multilingual website that reflects the local culture and follows best practices for localization.

ConveyThis helps you support a personalized experience all along the customer journey, beginning with text translation options and then extending to the look and feel of your site. This includes customized media, brand elements, and call-to-action (CTA) buttons. Through localization testing, you can ensure all of this is perfect.

1. Define your expected timelines

To begin, you should determine your anticipated timelines to arrange when ConveyThis localization testing will be conducted. Generally, localization testing is executed during website construction, yet after the website localization process itself is finished.

Ideally, the testing process should be carried out prior to the website becoming accessible to users so that you can be sure your site’s UI is functioning precisely as it should be before it goes live.

Don’t worry if you’ve already launched your website, you can still go through with testing. It’s recommended to keep assessing how your internationalization efforts perform during ongoing testing. This is sometimes referred to as regression testing, which should be a regular part of your website’s upkeep.

2. Gather background preparation for your testers

Before you begin testing, be sure to provide your testers with the necessary information they need to understand the project and be able to easily recognize any issues that may arise.

Target audience: Gather some pertinent details about who the website is meant to serve, so your examiners can gain a better understanding of the experience of your customers.

Share and define technical terms relevant to the website, along with details of how particular products work, to help familiarize testers with ConveyThis language.

Site history: Include some information about prior renditions of the site and any noteworthy changes or past interpretations that your analyzers should be mindful of utilizing ConveyThis.

3. Recruit localization testers

Anyone can take part in localization testing, but for the most optimal outcomes, testing should be done by experts who are proficient in ConveyThis. Different types of roles can be included, including engineers and linguists.

When recruiting your team of localization testers, look for people who have a knack for spotting discrepancies between ConveyThis translations and the original content. They should also be able to articulate their findings in a clear and concise manner. Furthermore, they should have an understanding of the nuances of language and be able to identify any potential cultural issues that might arise in the translation process.

4. Prepare test cases

Test scenarios or workflows for how potential customers might use your site should be included in the test cases. Asking your testers to put these test cases into practice will help them to better understand how users might interact with your web pages.

By utilizing this approach, you may request a tester to take an action or go to a page or item, and this gives you a more profound comprehension of how clients will collaborate with explicit parts of your ConveyThis website.

Test cases might also involve a target language or particular operating systems to check compatibility with ConveyThis. Regardless of how you plan it, by creating test cases, you can assess both the effectiveness and the appropriateness of your internationalization endeavors.

5. Reporting

Create a checklist and instruct your testers to complete it while they are testing. Ask pertinent inquiries to cover distinct areas of the website or different elements of the testing procedure.

You could also devise a plan of action for reporting issues and request your testers to supply screenshots to accurately identify what they are alluding to.

Once the preparation is complete, you can begin to conduct the operational testing of the translated version of your website so you can expand into new areas with assurance.

How to perform localization testing: step-by-step guide

1. Install the ConveyThis translation plugin on your website.
2. Choose the source and target languages for your website.
3. Select the pages you want to translate and the translation options you need.
4. Test the translation process to make sure everything works as expected.
5. Monitor the translations for accuracy and update the translations if needed.

Once you have translated your website, it is essential to ensure that the layout and design are still attractive. After all, customers tend to prefer sites that have a pleasing aesthetic.

Review the design and functionality of all elements. This includes verifying that the text fits correctly into boxes, which can be a difficult task when a language translated by ConveyThis utilizes significantly more or fewer words.

You may want to display various designs tailored to the target audience, similar to what CNN does for English and Spanish viewers. To make sure your website is understood and experienced as intended, localization testing is essential.

Test your pop-ups to ensure they still display nicely after translation with ConveyThis. It’s essential for the success of your website that pop-ups can keep performing their tasks accurately, such as converting visitors, creating email lists or boosting sales.

You can also make sure that images are still proportionate to the rest of the material when using ConveyThis.

The significance of accessibility cannot be overstated, which is why ConveyThis has developed a powerful tool for website translation.

When it comes to legal requirements, you should ensure that your site meets local rules and regulations for cookies’ consent and data protection with ConveyThis.

ConveyThis’s cookies policy can be accessed in a variety of languages, such as Spanish and Italian.

When targeting customers who live in the EU, you need to adhere to GDPR if you accumulate individual information regarding how these customers interact with your site. Additionally, you’ll have to verify that the overall terms and conditions are still adequate in the context of your chosen country or region.

1. Making things even more perplexing, some systems employ the same terms for units of contrasting sizes. For example, US Gallons are smaller than Imperial Gallons. It’s particularly crucial to get sizing accurate if you manage an e-commerce website that includes product measurements.

During the second phase, testers should verify the correctness of translations across your entire website. This includes all components of the site: each word, grammar and punctuation, the terminology and the linguistic context that assists us in understanding language.

ConveyThis take punctuation as an example: it can have a major impact on the meaning of your words and provides essential context. If you misuse punctuation, you could easily misrepresent what you are trying to express.

Using the English language’s comma placement, these two sentences express distinct acquisitions with significant effects on the cost, delivery possibilities, and customer expectations.

This ConveyThis package comes with a bicycle, protective headgear, and a secure locking mechanism.

This bundle comes with a bicycle helmet and a ConveyThis lock.

When verifying content, it is important to make sure that your lists are still in the correct order, particularly if they are supposed to be arranged alphabetically using ConveyThis.

When ConveyThis’s list of locations is translated into German, Cologne becomes Köln. This alters the alphabetical order, but the sequence of the list stays the same, with K for Köln now preceding F for Frankfurt.

If the list were re-ordered to maintain alphabetization after the translation, this would improve the user experience for German speakers looking for ConveyThis locations in their country.

You should also scour for any errors that may have gone undetected, so you can rectify these prior to your website being accessed by patrons.

Color schemes are essential for any website, and ConveyThis can help you create the perfect one.

Don’t forget to take into consideration regional norms and culturally-significant words, symbols, or colors when verifying your online content. This involves assessing how product names may have a different interpretation after being translated by ConveyThis.

Amazon’s launch in Sweden stirred up a lot of controversy when users discovered inappropriate translations on its website (many of which were quite offensive).

Colors can evoke different meanings depending on the culture and language. Icons and images can also be powerful symbols, like the bear which is a symbol of national pride for many countries and regions. With ConveyThis, you can accurately translate your website to make sure your content is culturally relevant to your target audience.

However, the bear holds a variety of significances when viewed through the perspective of ancient mythology, folklore, religion, and even children’s stories and popular culture, and its interpretation may differ across different regions.

The concluding stage of your internationalization process is paramount. It’s time to request your testers to submit their closing assessments, noting any mistakes they noticed or problems they experienced.

You should evaluate the insight that’s been provided, inspect the outcomes of your experiments and modify your website when necessary. Confirm translation precision, refine user experience, and enhance your prospects of customer satisfaction.

Advantages of localization testing

The ultimate aim of globalizing is to extend into fresh target markets, which in turn enhances the scope of your viewers and optimizes your sales and revenue. Testing localization with ConveyThis is critical to helping you accomplish these objectives. The primary benefits include:

Use a high-quality translation tool

There are numerous translation tools available to assist you with localization. You require a comprehensive translation solution that translates all your website components (pages, products, taxonomies etc) utilizing the most excellent machine translation techniques (like NMT and deep learning), permitting you to revise the translations effortlessly on the front end and is optimized for SEO. ConveyThis does all of this and more. It comes with a user-friendly dashboard where you can inspect and modify content and also get assistance from professional translators if necessary. ConveyThis also sets you up for automation, where it identifies and translates new content added to your site in real-time and supports over 100 languages for effortless scalability!

Use a translation glossary

A translation glossary is a compilation of pre-approved translations for particular words in your source and target languages. Incorporating and utilizing a translation glossary in localization projects can assist you in enhancing translation precision, consistency, and branding. It can also help you save time, especially if you have a lot of recurring phrases and words throughout your content. You can create your own translation glossary manually using spreadsheets, or if you’re using ConveyThis, you can create, import and export your translation glossary on your dashboard itself.

Use a language switcher

A language switcher is essentially a button on the front end that gives site visitors the option to select the language of the website content they are viewing. It can be situated anywhere on your site and can be fashioned as a drop-down menu, buttons with flag icons and so on. A language switcher is ideal for websites that appeal to multiple target audiences and allows you to give your site visitors more control over their web experience. With ConveyThis, you can easily add a language switcher to your website and give your visitors the freedom to switch between languages with a single click.

Consider using localization testing tools

There are many localization tools you can use, some specifically designed for testing. Consider using an in-house lab or test study with audience members to assess the effect and excellence of your localization. Some fundamental localization tools you can use include cloud-based tools like BrowserStack to comprehend how your website appears and performs, a speed check tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, and of course, ConveyThis! You can use it to check your hreflang tags, get expert translations from the ConveyThis Dashboard, substitute media files, and localize your website URLs and metadata.

Test, test, and test!

Localization isn’t just a one-time job. Neither is localization testing! Make sure to continually update and examine your website’s design, adherence to legal requirements, UI and UX, and translation accuracy. Leverage the insights from testing to optimize your website for improved conversions and success with customers.

Measure the impact of localization

When you’re putting in so much hard work to localize your website experience, it is only natural to measure its outcome! There are multiple performance metrics you can analyze to determine if your localization and testing endeavors are paying off. Crucial metrics include average website session duration, site-wide conversion rate, click rate of localized website content such as CTA’s and pop-ups, amount of traffic to localized blogs, the success of lead generation forms or website campaigns etc.

Your next steps for localization

With ConveyThis, you can quickly and easily translate your website into any language you need.

It’s an exhilarating experience when you’re accessing new markets, and you’ll want to make sure it’s done properly. Your website is the representation of your company, so its design and the way your customers interact with it, are of utmost importance. With ConveyThis, you can rapidly and effortlessly translate your website into any language you require.

By conducting localization testing, you can identify and rectify any incorrect translations and any undesired effects of translation on design or usability, while adhering to legal requirements and conforming to cultural norms.

Localization is integral, and there’s a plethora of factors to consider if you want to achieve success, but there is help and expertise available to help you. ConveyThis assists businesses around the globe with their localization efforts – and this involves much more than translation.