How to QA your internationalized website ?
Get past the limits of I18n and reach international audience.(Disponible en Français ici)
Localize the graphic assets
The first thing I usually notice first on poorly internationalized websites is when images, video or other assets are not translated.
As an example, an event manager will ask a graphic designer to make all the printable contents to advertise the event and later use these on the web.
Without any instruction, the graphic designer will create posters and flyers in one language and deliver them for the purpose of being used in a physical and monolingual space.
Later, the event manager will cut on budget and use these on the web as well after a bit of cropping or small adaptations.
When the non native users going to the event switches the website’s language, they will randomly see texts in the wrong language showing on the images or start videos, download documents and so on in the wrong language.
The solution to that issue is quite simple to manage but it will of course require that you adapt the asset delivery practices and this part might be expensive.
The workaround is to keep graphical content graphical and avoid any texts in the assets files.
This might be an issue for videos and pdf documents like forms or tickets, if you want to make them accessible to an international audience but are still short on budget, you can use a similar localization workflow but replace human work with technologies such as OCR (Optical character recognition) and machine generated subtitles.
The result will be bad and harm the localization market (and therefore your partnerships with good agencies or freelancers) but it would be too opinionated not to mention you can still make that choice if it makes sense for you.
Wether you go for human or machine, you can implement both solutions using Crowdin’s Asset localization feature, you can also start translating your images with Canva’s image translator.
Define third parties for locale interoperability
The second thing I notice are buggy third parties not aligned with the language selected.
Ever seen a map, diagram, form, login or payment screen showing up in a random language in the middle of a Website you access in english ? I did, and it looks so bad. 🥲
Non international companies often forget to define the proper configuration when integrating the third parties, maybe because they just blindly copy an embed or API link without reading the internationalization specifications.
That’s unfortunate because most of the popular integrations offer such features and they are very easy to use, very often, that is as simple as changing two characters in an url but most people will not even think about reading the content of these URL.
An URL is an interface and therefore features different functions defined by the developer, it’s always good to understand these function before integrating them to your website.
Now you might think this is not a problem for internationnal companies who employ many engineers… Well that would be great if it wasn’t the case of course but… let’s look into it.
One implementation I often find is to configure the third party to detect the user’s language.
First, user language detection might come with different results depending how it is implemented and this should be enough to understand you cannot ensure continuity of a localized service if you rely on user language detection only.
Second, they might be really bad at detecting the user language. I was born in Belgium, we have 3 official languages and I experienced bad language detection practices many times before I even knew what internationalization meant.
Companies like Samsung, Google or Microsoft would randomly switch from French to Dutch in the middle of a normal process and make it suddenly very hard to go trough.
Later, when I moved to 4 new European countries, I experienced public institutions offering localized services according to Schengen policies, but eventually sharing a non localized phone number.
This is very frustrating to go trough a whole online process to end up with an automatic answer in a language you don’t understand.
Third parties are not only APIs or embeded services, sometimes it is as simple as a phone number leading to a customer service that is not localized.
Think about where the information you share leads and wether the destination continue the localized experience or suddenly breaks it.
If there is no choice but to exit the localized experience, don’t do it brutally in a buggy/disrespectful way, make it clear instead that your services do not extend that far and you are not yet able to provide a standardized help following the usual process, provide a way around to get a personal help or don’t localize at all since this means you spend resources in a service that you are not able to ensure anyway.
Think about discoverability
One thing that will go unseen by most reactive QA is the discoverability of your website by the audience it has been localized for.
The reason I say this will go unseen is because that’s basically the part that won’t bring either feedbacks or issues in acceptance environment (if it has not been designed for it).
Discoverability is how you strategize so that your website is indexed on search engines or shared on social networks in the right language but not only.
It can also mean that the usual category of partners you are working with will need to open themselves to the same audience and localize they own practices — or that you will need new partners to reach a new audience.
Let say you sell tailor made trips in english and want to get into Japanese market, you will very likely need to get work with tourism agencies in Japan and adapt your whole partners onboarding process to them before you can reach results any similar to those you have with your English speaking audience.
If you fail to make you website discoverable, this will very much feel like you spent money on something that people don’t want to use and you will not even know why since they are actually not aware it even exists.
A website is not just deployed on a server and passively bringing in new customers or delivering information to the people who need it, it is delivered to the right people by an organization trough huge efforts ranging from marketing to partnership management and content optimization.
Navigate in plain sea
Remember the good old world ? Some people used to believe that earth is flat and if you navigate to the end of seas, you’ll eventually get to fall into the void.
That exactly what it is like to click on a link, wait for the loading time and eventually realize it doesn’t lead anywhere else than a 404 page.
While most people running a website are aware they should avoid links to blank page, it often happen that some pages are not translated or use a title based url which therefore changes depending the language.
This eventually leads the user to the 404 page when the website could either link to the right page or not display the deceiving link at all.
Let say you want to add a link to your favorite French fries restaurant on your blog, but this blog is localized for both British English and international… hum American English.
Let say you use a static link in your blog, the American version will display a link-to-my-french-fries which will be the same for the British version when it should actually be a link-to-my-chips.
That’s a big issue since British users will not be able to access the tailor made link-to-my-chips page you made for them.
If you didn’t make this page, they why would British want to have a big button leading to link-to-my-french-fries ?
That’s just how it works for other languages, minus the humor.
I hope this doesn’t offend anyone, french fries are Belgian at the first place anyway so I am the only one who might feel offend here 🙃.
I hope this small article will help you reach new horizons and be more inclusive, follow me for more content related to internationalization.
I am an European freelancer in data protection, internationalization and social uses of process driven technologies. I write on subjects at the intersection of information systems and general interest.
