The global market is not the same what it used to be.
Most large enterprises operate worldwide while many mid-sized and smaller firms plan to expand into different geographies.
They are exploring different opportunities, developing global strategies and processes, and entering into various strategic partnerships to expand their footprint.
Today, it has become a common phenomenon for enterprises to have departments, subsidiaries, partners, and most importantly customers across the globe.
In the current scenario what is important for them is to ensure the global-readiness of their applications.
There is an increasing need for enterprises to determine whether their global applications are really global, while it is essential for vendors to develop global apps if they have to ensure success for their applications.
For instance, an enterprise operating in the banking sector needs to support regional requirements like regional supervisory regulation as well as local reporting requirements.
Global apps should be able to support equally well for all users irrespective of the region or culture.
Enterprises should focus on applications that support localized user interfaces and data in multiple languages.
From the vendor perspective, the number of cultures an application supports will have a direct relationship with its customer base.
For global-readiness, applications/products need to be localized and then tested on many counts like language/copy context, consistent functionality, compatibility, and interoperability.
Internationalization and localization testing ensures reliability, usability, acceptability, and above all relevance to audience and users worldwide.
Internationalization is the process of designing and coding a product/application so that it performs appropriately when it is modified for use in different languages and locales.
Internationalization testing helps enterprises identify the potential problems in an application with regard to its global readiness and ensures that the code supports global requirements without disturbing the functionality.
Localization testing ensures customization of an application for a given culture.
It mainly focuses on translating the product UI and few other changes required to make it appropriate for a particular target region/culture.
Overall, Internationalization and Localization testing ensures compatibility and consistency across all localized versions.
This is done by defining a baseline standard, in general the local version of the application under test.
While internationalization and localization testing ensures global-readiness of apps, enterprises should address their requirements right from the design phase of the application so as to maximize the quality while reducing costs.
Trying to reframe existing applications to be global ready will often lead to increased costs and less quality.