Localizability Testing & Pseudolocalization

Pseudolocalization is the process of verifying application readiness to be translated. It verifies that the application UI can be easily localized to any language without making source code modifications.

Since localizability bugs have to be fixed in the source code, they must be searched at the beginning of the translation process, so this tool allows you to avoid necessity of fixing bugs for every language version at a later point.

Free Pseudolocalization Tool

This tool requires you to be logged in as Crowdin user. You also have to setup your Crowdin project to be able to get dummy translation for your application.

Methods and Benefits of Pseudolocalization

Characters Transformation

  • Check how your application works with Asian hieroglyphics.
  • Find non-translatable texts in your application.
  • Check whether you have put all translatable strings into resources file.
  • Find odd strings that should not be translated (it may be strings like application name). You can reduce translation costs after doing this since translators usually have rates per word.
  • Check how you application works with right-to-left languages

Length Correction

  • Enables you to see how different languages will fit your application UI. For example Spanish texts in average 25-30% longer than English, Japanese is 30%-60% shorter.

Prefix / Suffix Adding

  • Allows to see how concatenated strings will behave after localization.
  • It's also useful when expanding translations length to see where string starts and ends in your UI.
  • Finally, when using placeholders that are used for other localizable strings it's important to see how they will behave if translator will re-order placeholders in translated string.
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Free Crowdin Pseudo Localization Tool

Crowdin translation simulation tool enables quick and powerful round-trip localizability testing of:

  • texts expansion
  • support for different character sets in your application
  • hardcoded texts
  • non-translatable texts and texts on images

Pseudo localization methods provided above can be combined in any order with custom parameters. All HTML tags, placeholders in your source strings (things like %s, {0} etc..) will be preserved.

Why is it important?

Waiting for the application to be completely localized via community or LSP can bring a significant lag into the translation testing schedule.

In addition, it may not be cost-effective to translate UI text at the beginning of the development cycle, as it might change and need to be retranslated.

Here, pseudolocalization can be the best option, as no real translation is needed.