How to do a QA of your Multilingual Website without Knowing any other Language

Even if you don’t speak the languages in which your website has been translated, you still can do a quick screen check of all the pages to see if everything looks OK.

• Check if all the pages have been translated and the final files are delivered in the same format like the source files provided.

• Check for missing translation: If your site is relatively small, you could even check if all the paragraphs have been translated and there isn’t any missing text. This sounds like a process that can’t be done without knowing the target language, but you could visually appreciate if there is something missing: check the punctuation, look after numbers, and spaces between paragraphs; if one paragraph in the English version has 5 sentences, then your German version should also have 5 sentences. For some languages like Hindi or Burmese it will be a little more challenging to delimitate the sentences because of the different separators, but not impossible.

• Text displays properly: make sure that the translator used the right character encoding. To check on this, you can open the html file in Notepad (don’t use Word, you won’t be able to see the tags) or open the html page in Internet Explorer and got to View/Source. The preferred encoding now is UTF-8; it can represent characters of the widest range of languages.

GB2312 is the registered internet name for a key official character set of the People's Republic of China, used for simplified Chinese characters. Big-5 or Big5 is a character encoding method used in Taiwan (Republic of China) and Hong Kong for Traditional Chinese characters. To be sure that your page has the right encoding, check the text between metatags. Or go to View/Encoding

• Make sure that Arabic languages are displayed from right to left.

• Check if the company name, trademarks, others things that suppose to stay in source language are preserved through the entire website; have a glossary of terms that should stay in English.

In Canada, Quebec, the trademark sign TM could be replaced with MC (marque de commerce). Eg: Yellowpages.ca English version: All Rights Reserved. Yellow Pages™, Fingers & Design™ (Walking Fingers logo), YellowPages.ca™, MontrealPlus.ca™, QuebecPlus.ca™, CalgaryPlus.ca™ and EdmontonPlus.ca™ are registered trademarks and CanadaTollFree.ca, CanadaPlus.ca, OttawaPlus.ca, TorontoPlus.ca, and VancouverPlus.ca are trademarks of Yellow Pages Group Co. in Canada.

Canada411 is a trademark of Stentor Resource Centre Inc. used under license. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2006 Yellow Pages Group Co.

• Check if all the graphics have been translated and look good: for some languages, the text will be longer after translation, so the graphic might be larger; check with the translator for a short word, or check if the web designer if there is a way to change the graphic size.

• Check if units of measurement have been localized and are same for all languages. Most of the countries are using the International System of Units, so in your translation you should have meters for length, kilograms for mass, Celsius for temperature, etc. If the website is translated in more than one language, check on consistency. Some of the translators can approximate some measurements different. eg: 12’ x 16’ can rounded to 3.65 m x 4.87 or 4 m x 5 m, or 3,5 m x 4,5 m…

• Date and time conversion: In most European countries, a.m. and p.m. are not used, and a good number of people might not know what this is supposed to mean as they use the 24-hour system to indicate exact times. When using two digits each to represent year, month, and day, for some languages, the actual date might not be very clear.

A single date in the format “01/02/06” could be interpreted as three different dates W3C suggesting: Use unambiguous dates on your web pages: Always use a four-digit number for the year (this clearly distinguishes the year from the day of the month) Always use words (abbreviated if necessary) for the months There were some proposals to add a and/or element to HTML, so that browsers could localize display, but they never materialized. Eg: Yahoo Canadian portal English version uses this form to represent the time and date 8:57pm, Mon Jul 3. However, the French version is very different: lun 3 juil, 20h52 (day, date, hour).

• Functionality: Check if all the links are working; this process also can be done automate with some special software.

• Check if your web pages display properly on Internet Explorer and also on Nescape Navigator; verify how your website works on different platforms.

• PDF files for download:check if the links work and the file can be downloaded or visualized without problems – check the size of the file (the PDF should be a screen resolution file, not high resolution).

• Validate your page: W3C HTML Validation Service It checks HTML documents for conformance to W3C HTML and XHTML recommendations and other HTML standards.

Article Source: http://www.webdesignarticles.net.

About the Author:
Felicia Bratu is a project manager with wintranslation, a translation agency located in Canada. wintranslation provides translation services in over 70 languages