## 4. Ensuring Quality

The quality of your localized version will have a large impact on its acceptance in the marketplace. You can greatly enhance your chances of producing a quality product by using experienced and skilled localizers, and by performing post-translation testing.

When performing the actual translation, you should be sensitive to a number of issues:

- Completeness: you should aim for as thorough a translation as possible. Try not to leave portions of the product untranslated. However, be aware that some terms may best be left in English, depending on local conventions.
- Suitability: all translations should be suitable and appropriate for product, the language, the market and the customers you intend to reach. This includes using the proper technical terminology for a give platform or computer operation, as well as using language that is readily understood by the average user of the product in a given language. You should, where possible, try to use terminology which is similar to other products available on the same platform (without violating copyrights or trademarks, of course).
- Accuracy: you should be sure your translation conveys the same meaning and intention as the original English.
- Grammar and spelling: you should be sure your translation is grammatically accurate and free from spelling errors.

Keep in mind that engineers do not necessarily make the best localizers!

Once localization is complete, there are two basic types of post-translation testing that should be done:

Linguistic Review | Checking all translations for accuracy and appropriateness in the actual context in which they appear.
Functional Testing | Ensuring the product still functions as designed (or at least as well as the US English product).

For the linguistic review, you should have an independent reviewer (i.e. not the person who implemented the translations) check every string for the items listed above. In some cases, it may be enough to review the running product itself; however, it is also valuable to print out your translations (using ToolCool or your own translation tools) and review them externally from the product.

For the functional testing, your best resource are the directions contained in the localization notes and this document. You should review the completed product's localization notes with this document in hand, double checking that you have followed all the instructions contained here and in the appropriate .DOG file's COMMENT field.

Consider the following general guidelines when testing:

- It is helpful to have a second copy of the product running with the English version so you can compare them side by side (a second computer might be helpful or required for this).
- Walk through every menu in each module you have localized looking for translation accuracy, pick letter conflicts and other problems.
- Bring up as many dialogs as you can, looking for translation accuracy, pick letter conflicts, truncated strings and functionality issues.
- Use as many of the features of the product as possible: read web pages, read and send mail and discussion group messages, set mail filters, search mail and discussion groups, create web pages using the Composer, etc. If functional problems are found, you should compare the same steps you took in the localized product to the English product: if the two products fail in the same way, it is a "core" bug, which can only be fixed by changing the core product's executable. If the localized product fails while the English product does not, then it is probably a translation-related bug; these can be fixed by altering the way you localize the product (perhaps by not translating a particular item, or by translating it differently).

The following section tells you how to report bugs in the localization kit itself, or in the core product.

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