Quality Assurance in Development to Aid Translation
When users encounter errors on translated interfaces, such as truncated texts or texts that are displayed in the wrong language, they have a tendency to assume that poor-quality translation work is the root of the problem. However, experience shows that poor-quality translation work is often not the cause of such issues. It is perfectly possible for developers to create user interfaces that look great in the development language, but for which high-quality translated versions simply cannot be produced.
As a translation administrator or coordinator, it’s in your interests to encourage developers to ensure that their user interfaces can in fact be reproduced successfully in languages other than the development language. It’s in the developers’ interests too, because it’s far quicker for them to fix bugs during the development cycle before translation even starts than to fix them after they have caused problems on translated user interfaces.
The UI text space calculator enables developers to ensure that
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Translators into all target languages have enough space in the translation editor to write out their translations, instead of being forced to enter abbreviations.
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All translations are displayed in full on the UI, instead of being truncated.
For more information, see The UI Text Space Calculator.
Pseudo-translation enables developers to identify and fix bugs during the development cycle that would otherwise cause problems, and significantly increase costs, during the subsequent translation cycle.
Examples of such bugs include:
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Texts in the development language for which longer translations cannot be created.
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Texts in the development language whose translations are likely to be truncated on the user interface.
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Hard-coded texts that cannot be translated at all.
For more information, see Pseudo-Translation.