How to validate international products

Once you have established your overall international strategy, put in place a plan that takes into account legal requirements, banking and payments, product delivery, regional support, and the localization process as outlined in How to release products internationally, ensure that you have the right level of validation at each step.

As you develop your application, you'll need to ensure that your application functions correctly for users in all target markets for all languages supported by your product. This article gives a quick overview of the kind of issues that need to be considered. For a more detailed description, see Why international validation is important.

As you internationalize your product, ensure that each area is validated. Typically, that work can be broken down into tasks that can be performed before the product is translated, followed by translation, and finally, validation of each target language. This approach can reduce the risk of significant changes having to be made after translation has started. This includes:

• Data, especially text data, isn't limited to any script or writing system, and that data can be exchanged between different systems.
• Your application can display user data and UI text in the scripts used in the target markets
• Your application respects the conventions and settings from the operating system, especially locale-related settings, such as numeric formats, sort order, and capitalization.
• Your application respects the conventions of each target market, such as postal address format and paper sizes.
• Your application is ready to translate. This work includes externalizing strings, but also ensuring that the source material uses terminology consistently and avoids culture-specific references and slang. You should aim to ensure that your source language text becomes accessible for users who aren't native speakers.
• Your application should support different screen sizes, resolutions, and orientations. You should ensure that different keyboard layouts and Input Method Editors are compatible with your application.

Once you have validated that your product is internationalized, the next step is localization, followed by localization testing. The testing should cover all of your application languages.

You should also ensure that your application is able to run on any version of the OS language and is able to handle data in any language.

Localization testing should ensure all the user interface text is displayed correctly following the conventions of each target language and culture. It should convey the same meaning as the source text. You should also ensure that your localized product meets the needs of the target market. The scope of this work can be very broad, and can include:

• Specific features to support the market
• Country/regional standards and legal requirements
• Preferred or alternative platforms
• External data sources
• Payment methods
• Compatibility with other products
• Latency and local hosting