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Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Software Localization - some details in terms of how the process work - Part 6

In previous posts on the subject of localization, I have been writing about various processes and techniques employed in the process of localization, covering testing, and the processes used for tagging strings for localization. However, this post covers something different, the difference in teams between those who do overall product testing, and those who do the process of localization.
There is a big difference between the teams employed in the process of product testing and those who are involved in the process of localization. Teams involved in product testing are more in touch with functionality of the product, with the discussions related to the development of the functionality, the writing of test cases for these features, as well as the blackbox and whitebox testing of these features. The team is responsible for ensuring that the features work as well as they are supposed to and all bugs are shaken out of the system. It is the product team that finally certifies the product, and they typically do so for the English version of the product.
However, it is the localization team that is responsible for the certification of the various language versions of the product. The team does functional testing, but it is a reality that most of the functional bugs are found in the English testing of the product, and it is mostly localization bugs such as string corrections, layout issues, and wrong corrections that are found by the localization testing team. They would find the bugs that are mostly not needed to be fixed by the engineers on the product team, instead need to be fixed by localization engineers. Thus, the localization process is normally on a separate process from the product team processes.


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