Quality is about meeting the needs and expectations of customers with respect to elements such as functionality, design, reliability, durability, and price of your products and services. Quality assurance (QA) is the last step before you launch these products and services, and it is a procedure to ensure the quality, focusing on improving your process and making it efficient and effective as possible as per the quality standards your company follows.

            Quality assurance is especially important when going global because it helps companies save money and effort, boosts your customers’ confidence and satisfaction, and enhances their experience related to your brand. This procedure helps prevent prevent product defects before they arise. 

Since culture plays such an important role when expanding into new markets, companies need to ensure the quality of their localization processes to build trust and loyalty with their new customers. 

QA identifies any errors that may have occurred in these processes as internationalization, translation and finally localization occur before it takes place. Thus, QA testing for localization guarantees locale-specific characters appear correctly, including names, dates, holidays, numbers, currencies, salutations, as well as ensuring that the localized versions of your products and services stay true to your brand’s original promise.

Those working in the localization QA process should consider cultural factors such as color and representation of ethnicity, ensuring the experiences of customers in your new market feel local and far from generic. They are the first people who see the localized product or service in its entirety, and they need to be able to ensure that the context and flow of localized products and services works for the customers. 

            In the process of localization QA testing, there are three ways to analyze the quality of your products and/or services. The first one of these three ways is linguistic testing, which involves accuracy of translation within context, consistency of terminology, missing content and the accordance of the localized product or service with the country standards. The second one is cosmetic testing, which includes consistency with the source, images and character display (for different alphabets etc.). The third way localization QA tests a product or a service, is functional testing, such as testing if the links work properly, or if the applications behave as intended after the translation and localization of their contents. 

            Avoiding downfalls while attempting internalization is as simple as hiring a good localization team and establishing a systematic localization quality assurance program. 😊