Localization Academy

Defect or Bug

If you’re new to the localization industry, you should understand what a bug or a defect is before you get started.


What is a bug or defect?

It’s an issue, something that has creeped into our localized product that is not a good thing that we don’t want the users to experience. It’s basically something that’s very bad. And we should, in most cases, do something about it. So, how do bugs happen, actually?

So, you get, at the start, you get the English files, which ideally should be without bugs, although it’s not always guaranteed. And then you do this beautiful thing called localization. And at the end, you spit out some localized files, which can have some issues. Now to give you an idea about what kind of bugs we can encounter. For example, if you have a software or mobile app, or I don’t know, a website, and you have a button there. It is a button, which says, “Okay.” I don’t know, maybe in some languages, that “Okay” is translated into many more characters, so the button suddenly doesn’t fit the new translation.

Another example that can give you is, I don’t know, let’s say, you have a marketing some PDF or document, which has a nice image in English one, but in localization, for some reason, that image is missing. So typically, the bugs are detected by testers, QA testers, whose sole purpose is to go through the localized things and maybe compare it to the English one, and see what is different, what stands out, what are the localized version works, if it’s a software and so on, and then they file the bugs so that the engineers can fix them. And at the end, like I mentioned before, the whole idea of the bugs is first to detect them and then to fix them. So the the final users when they get the localized version, they don’t even see any bugs, so they feel like we created a perfect localized version for that.

That’s a bug for you.

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