[Anubad] GSoC Project choice: An application UI testing framework for validating translation completeness and quality

[Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 8:29 PM, Saurav <online.saurav at gmail.com> wrote:

>   - *"A typical problem in the ... translated strings for an application."*
>      - During translation from English-Bengali / Bengali-English, all the
>      strings are not translated (translatable?)
>   - "The basic premise of this project idea is to ... known UI Guidelines."
>      - 3 things to be tested:
>         - translations correct/not
>         - translations complete/not
>         - ?
>      - "A knowledge of available ... Python is required."
>      - Will PyUnit be suitable for this purpose?
>   - "There are existing tools/scripts which do parts of the outlined idea."
>      - Could I have more information?

Translators work with translatable objects called .po files. Tools
like Pootle etc have "battery included" tests (called pofilters) which
enable the translators and reviewers to observe the errors in the
submitted files.

Now, it is a bit trivial to find out which strings are not translated
at the file level. What is non-trivial is to figure out the same from
the application interface. And, as an added complexity, figuring out
whether a translated/untranslated string violates UI guidelines thus
leading to a diminished user experience.

The objective of the project is to come up with a new (or, investigate
whether reuse of an existing is possible) framework that allows
scripting of tests to trap the two conditions I mentioned above.

(I've written about this in an earlier email and, the portion below is
a quote from that)

The basic premise of the idea is to be able to come up with a test
framework and, an easy way to write test cases to determine
completeness and quality of translations.

Completeness is defined as when all the possible strings within a
known application, as seen from the GUI appear translated. So, for
example, if you take an application like Firefox, say, how do you
figure out that the GUI bits of the application will have every
translatable element in the local language ? Additionally, there is a
need to figure out if, during translation, the UI element underwent
distortion from the original thus leading to unpleasant user
experience.

Quality is defined as to whether the strings adhere to the known
terminology/styles.



-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog/>