Which language would benefit in Software Testing career?

Question

I'm Software Test Engineer and have 3+ years of experience. Still I haven't done any localization testing. As far I can guess, a tester should know the language to test the application for that specific language.(Correct me here if I'm not correct about localization testing assumption.)

As I can see, many applications are mostly localized to languages like: Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean.

Can you suggest which of the above languages would be best for my software test career for me to learn?

Also let me know if learning one of the above languages is really worth to make your profile much better as Software Test Engineer.

Answer 1

If you are going to go through the effort to learn another language, consider factors other than whether it will make you a better software tester. Your language skills will hopefully outlive your software testing career. And there are more lucrative skills you can learn than a second language for furthering your career, e.g. programming skills.

Answer 2

It really depends on yours "environment". As for me: I've been working for many years on project with Swedish, Finnish, German and Norwegian languages - but to test correct localization I need to have access to a contact person - native speaker. It is a QA work, not a translator. But if you plan to relocate somewhere in Asia and work with China's or Japan's companies - it would benefit you to learn the local language. Only English is "the must" everywhere.

UPD: Several times I'm contacted by HR's from Switzerland, Poland and Germany companies (I'm living in Ukraine), but nowhere the "native" language was a requirement, just English worked really well for me.

Answer 3

In my experience, localization uses a series of translation dictionaries for things like captions, labels and so forth. For anything more complex (legal disclaimers, website verbiage, and so on), a professional translator is used.

The QA role is typically to make sure that changing either the machine locale, the browser locale, or the application language setting changes everything in the application (except what's stored in the database) to use the selected language.

As a QA person, being able to speak another language is a bonus when it comes to localization testing, but it's not essential.

Answer 4

As per my experience it is OK if you know perfect ENGLISH because that is universal language anywhere. People/Client from diff. mostly prefer ENGLISH when they hire QA from diff. country. There are very less clients who need local language candidate because most of I.T companies work with diff. countries client so they given important to ENGLISH most.

Also As a QA we change companies , we never set in one company forever so for ex: if current company have more client from china and we start to learn Chinese language that is not good decision because company change then client change so finally ENGLISH helps anywhere.

Answer 5

It also depends what is your native language. To get into more-less fluent level will take less effort if target language is closer to your native language. Also, knowing few other languages increases speed of learning new one. Spanish, Portuguese and French are close (also Italian), so learning any other when you know one is much easier.

If you are speaker of any language from Indoeuropean language family learning other Indoeuropean language will be easier than non-IE language.

Also "Chinese" is not a single language, but group of different languages spoken in China which are considered single language for political reasons. Likely you mean "mandarin chinese".

Answer 6

It depends the size of the company you are looking to work for. If you are going for localization in a multinational organization you may not need to know any of the languages as their are so many they may have linguistic department or may even outsource the work load depending on the volume.

If you are looking to work for a smaller company that their product only reaches a few different languages it will depend on each individual company.

If you are set on learning a new language maybe look into the amount of countries speak each language and see what industries are big within them countries.

Example, Spanish is used in many countries so would be more practical than Irish as it would only be used by a handful of people within its own country.