Dana Li, Business Development Manager at hiSoft, gave a a talk on software localization and QA at IMUG.
These days, software company clients typically provide an internationalized product to hiSoft, and they translate it into 8 to 25 languages, then test the result for correct translation and functional behavior.
hiSoft uses whatever testing framework the client uses, so those can vary from commercial Silktest or QTP, to Open Source selenium. The hiSoft folks didn’t express any strong preference for frameworks.
AJAX is more difficult to do test automation for, as the entire page can be dynamic.
Generally nobody provides source code to be internationalized (like the web 1.0 days.)
An interesting project they did was to QA Chinese OCR software.
But every project has its own complications.
Afterward an Arabic consultant chatted a little about how Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has standardized Arabic writing world-wide, but there is a local spoken dialect in each region.
Thanks again to Apple for hosting IMUG.