Karen N. Johnson began as a technical writer in 1985 and later switched to software testing in 1992. She maintains a blog at TestingReflections, a collaborative site where she is featured as a main contributor. In her latest entry, she discusses search testing with different languages. Here is an excerpt from her blog:
“I started work on a new project and needed to address search testing with a wide assortment of languages. And geez, this is a puzzle I’ve worked with before so I thought I would share some thoughts around the topic of search testing with multiple languages.
At the start, I looked into how many languages and what languages I’ll be working with. Based on past (and current) experiences, I have certain reactions – from a testing perspective – to some languages.
Latin-based languages fall into one group. I used to think of English, Spanish and French as “different” languages but now I see these languages are rather similar from a test perspective. The same is true for any languages that use the Latin-based character set. . . .
. . . So when it was time to choose a handful of languages to test with, my reaction was to choose:
- one or more Latin-based languages
- one or more languages with a heavy use of dia- criticals
- an RTL language
- a language that is more symbolic than character-based
A common problem in testing with these languages is the lack of keyboard or a means of entering characters from different languages. Cut and paste can work if you’re careful. . . .”
To read more from Karen N. Johnson, visit her at www.testingreflections.com.
