Linguistic testing focuses on discovering both grammatical and cultural issues in translation, so it should be performed by testers with good linguistic awareness, such as native speakers of the target language. The first step for this testing is to choose the right linguistic testing model. There are currently two models, the test-case-based linguistic testing model and the screenshot-based linguistic testing model. In the past, the test-case-based one was more popular, but it requires the linguistic testers to be able to find the corresponding translation strings in the product by following the test cases, which is time consuming. Setting up a product environment and going through the test cases are the skills most linguistic testers are not good at. Also, the payment rate of linguistic testers is higher, so this model is more costly as well. So inevitably, the screenshot-based model has become more popular, since the localization functional testers could help linguistic testers take screenshots with localized builds, and linguistic testers only need to check translation strings by comparing the localized screenshots with the English ones. Thus, the cost of linguistic testing decreases. However, with this model, linguistic testers only focus on the translations in screenshots, and other strings will not be covered.

In most cases, one model is used for this testing, but if your product supports more languages, like Adobe Acrobat, which supports more than 20 languages, the linguistic testing workload may be too much for one outsourcing company within the given time. So you may choose to collaborate with more than one outsourcing company….More.

See: Multilingual

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