April 21, 2006 - Pseudo-Translation of Strings as an Aid to Internationalization Testing

Often, during the Internationalization process, all the text strings in an application or web site are extracted into separate files (sometimes called "resource files") for translation into a target language.

One technique useful in Internationalization and Localization testing, is to pseudo-translate your text into strings that can be understood by testers, but still will indicate if any strings remain untranslated.  Often a Perl script, or other automated technique, can do the pseudo-translation for you.  After translation, rebuild the application-under-test and look at it.

Any remaining unstranslated strings then probably represent strings that were incorrectly hard-coded and were not extracted into resources files.

There are a number of techniques for doing this.  For example:

• UPPERCASEIAN – this method translates each string to uppercase
• Bracketed – this brackets each string with [ and ]
• Egg Language – this places the string “egg” in front of each vowel
• All Xes – this replaces each character in the string with X
• Leading and Trailing Zs – this puts the string “zzz” in front and at the end of the phrase

How the phrase “All Things Quality” might be “translated” into various pseudo-locales for Internationalization testing purposes:

How Babelfish (http://babelfish.altavista.com/) translates the phrase “All Things Quality” into various languages

And for fun, how the Dialectizer (http://rinkworks.com/dialect/) translates the phrase "All Things Quality" into various "dialects":

Redneck	All Thin's Quality
Jive	All Doodads Quality
Cockney	All Finks Quality
Elmer Fudd	Aww Dings Qwawity
Swedish Chef	Ell Theengs Qooeleety
Moron	All Diggs Kality
Pig Latin	Allyay Ingsthay Ualityqay
Hacker	all tihngz quiality

[03/23/07] An update:

It turns out that the folks at Fog Creek Software first psuedo-translated their strings into Pig Latin as they prepared to translate Fog Bugz into German.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/03/13b.html