Internationalization and Localization Testing

Currently I have started working on Internationalization (I18N) and Localization (L10N) for one of the projects. Seems this is new world. Difference between two is very thin and overlaps most of the time. To put it neatly and carefully, I18N is testing of software to ensure that it is not tightly coupled to any locale/language features. L10N is testing of software with particular locale. As it comes out, I18N is followed by L10N. So first we have to check whether the software is ready to adapt new locale and when we are sure it is adaptable, then we test with specific locale. So L10N can uncover most of the defects which I18N cannot. But thorough I18N testing could provide good ground of L10N, effectively reducing the work required. Further, Together it is known as Globalization(G11N). So don’t get confused with third type of testing G11N.

When we started to work on these, Unicode, character set, UTF etc. terms were coming around often. So time to look at what it is. Its been quite a time for me to have moved from development now, so have to look at these concepts. What I very hazily remember is that there is ASCII charset which is quite limited to produce lot of characters used worldwide. So Unicode, a non profitable organization have started to put international standard in charset. UTF-8 is one of that standards. UTF known as Unicode Transformation Format, comes in three flavours. UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32. UTF-8 is more popular as it is backward compatible with ASCII.

You can read more about UTF-8 on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 .

Next blog topic I will try to put what are questions one should ask while starting to put through the strategy for G11N testing.