Псевдолокализация: Тестирование интернационализации программного обеспечения

Software translation testing
Pseudolocalization (or pseudo localization) is a software testing method used for testing internationalization aspects of software. Instead of translating the text of the software into a foreign language, as in the process of localization, the textual elements of an application are replaced with an altered version of the original language. For example, instead of "Account Settings", the text may be altered to display as "!!! Àççôûñţ Šéţţîñĝš ! !!". These specific alterations make the original words appear readable, but include the most problematic characteristics of the world's languages: varying length of text or characters, language direction, fit into the interface and so on.

Traditionally, localization of software is independent of the software development process. In a typical scenario, software would be built and tested in one base language (such as English), with any localizable elements being extracted into external resources. Those resources are handed off to a localization team for translation into different target languages. The problem with this approach is that many subtle software bugs may be found during the process of localization, when it is too late (or more likely, too expensive) to fix them. Pseudolocalization is designed to catch these types of bugs during the development cycle, by mechanically replacing all localizable elements with a pseudo language that is readable by speakers of the source language, but which contains most of the troublesome elements of other languages and scripts. This is why pseudolocalisation is to be considered an engineering or internationalization tool more than a localization one.

Although the pseudolocalization technique has been used at Microsoft since the late 90s, it was made available to developers as a feature during the Windows Vista development cycle. The type of pseudo language invented for this purpose is called a pseudo locale in Windows parlance. These locales were designed to use character sets and scripts characteristics from one of the three broad classes of foreign languages used by Windows at the time—basic ("Western"), mirrored ("Near Eastern"), and CJK ("Far Eastern"). For these recent version of Windows, the pseudo localized build is the primary staging build (the one created routinely for testing), and the final English language build is a "localized" version of that.

Besides the tools used internally by Microsoft, other internationalization tools now include pseudolocalization options. These tools include Alchemy Catalyst from Alchemy Software Development, SDL Passolo from SDL and Globalyst from g11n. Such tools include pseudo localization capability, including ability to view rendered Pseudo localized dialogs and automating the testing process itself. While tools like Globalyst complete the whole process of creating pseudolocalised build and automate the testing, it can also be done by running a custom made pseudolocalization script on the extracted text resources and manually testing it. There are a variety of free pseudolocalization resources on the Internet that will create pseudolocalized versions of common localization formats like iOS strings, Android xml, Gettext po, and others. These sites allow developers to upload strings file to a Web site and download the resulting pseudolocalized file.