Is there an easy way to verify all elements of an application have been translated?

Question

The current method is to click through every dialog, and manually verify all captions have been translated. One of the major problems with this approach, is that it's very time consuming. This is also error prone, since it's possible that not all error/warning messages have been verified.

Is there a better, faster way to accomplish this task?

Update:

Since I don't have the ability to change how the application was designed, and no control over the development process. what options are available to insure all text that appears in the application is properly displayed in the appropriate language?

Answer 1

There are conventions that will facilitate faster testing. For example, if every translatable caption is fetched from a message catalog, you could merely check whether the message catalogs have been translated. (Different development environments use different terms for "message catalog", but hopefully the concept is clear.)

It is possible to tailor a UI framework so that developers are more likely to use message catalogs rather than hard-coded strings. In my experience, developers do not like to work with that kind of framework because they are forced to deal with internationalization before they want to.

Edit

Even if your developers use message catalogs consistently, there is no guarantee that the translated text will render appropriately on the page. For example, if a translated string is too long, it may wrap or truncate or impact the geometry of the page in undesirable ways. If a message contains application-supplied values, it is also possible that the values are supplied in the wrong order. For example, while the English error message might be:

File data.txt is missing from directory /home/Tester101

the Spanish error message might be:

/home/Tester101 archivo no se encuentra en el directorio data.txt

Ultimately, regardless of how the application was designed, there is no substitute for scrutinizing every page with your own eyes.

Answer 2

This is a difficult one because even if you do get a great scenario where you can get all of the copy stripped out, you could still run into encoding issues in the application or several other things that could screw up a translation like @user246 mentions.

Some tools have been adapted for a few platforms like content management systems, to help facilitate this. Internationalization modules and the like for systems like Drupal. If something along those lines is available, they tend to give a pretty comprehensive breakdown and will even compare one translation against another.

Outside of that, if there is a lot of copy to sweep and compare I've started resorting to writing a spider/scraper. I'm not sure how feasible it would be for an installed/local application, but for web copy it is somewhat of a brute force way to compare text. If the copy is externalized in any way (.po files for instance) you could use a line-by-line comparison tool such as Beyond Compare to go line by line outside of the application if you aren't into the automation end of things.

Nothing really compares to your own eyes and/or the eyes of a native speaker of the localized language (for context) though.

Answer 3

Usually when you have properly internationalized your application, all the text strings (and other localization elements) have been moved into resource files where they are relatively simple to translate for a particular locale.

The Internationalization project may be time-consuming, but it makes the individual Localization projects far simpler and far less error-prone.