i18n Testing Template for Product Planning

Test every locale where you have shipped translations. If that is impractical (e.g., 20+ locales), test your primary locale, the longest language (usually German), one CJK language (Japanese or Chinese), and one RTL language (Arabic) if supported. This covers the four major layout challenge categories.

Native or near-native speakers catch issues that automated checks miss: awkward phrasing, cultural mismatches, and context-dependent translation errors. For functional tests (date formatting, currency display), any QA engineer can verify against the expected format table. For linguistic quality, you need native reviewers.

Yes, partially. Automated checks can verify string completeness (no missing translations), date/number formatting output, and layout overflow via screenshot comparison tools. Linguistic quality, cultural appropriateness, and context-dependent translations still require human review. A good approach is to automate the formatting and completeness checks and reserve human testers for linguistic and visual review.

Text overflow in fixed-width UI elements. German, Finnish, and other languages with long compound words regularly break buttons, table headers, and navigation labels sized for English. The fix is to design UI elements with flexible widths or to set maximum character limits per locale during translation. ---