Testing Challenges in Indic Languages Irfan Ahmad, Lead Quality Engineer QA InfoTech

Abstract Thanks to digital India campaign, demonetization and emergence of cashless economy, now not just only homegrown starts-up, a lot of global companies are also entering into Indic market and willing to give full-fledged Indic languages support in their products. In fact, of late they understand that English language user base in India is just around 10%. Some experts also predict that in future, some of the Indic languages may give a stiff competition to some of the European languages in terms of user base and software subscription if given a full-fledged support in all vernacular languages. In this presentation, I shall draw the light on the enablement and testing challenges in 10 major languages - Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi and Oria – which are commercially established. In terms of challenges, they are so many and start right from enablement phase to internationalization, localization of UI and shipping product in a particular language market. A simple example of challenge is how to enable culture friendly emoticons/stickers in a product on the occasion of Holi which doesn’t have a significant relevance in South India; similarly the case is with Onam and Pongal in North India. This paper tries to decode some of these testing challenges in enablement and integration phases using linguistic and cultural rules and how the whole process of localization and linguistic testing in Indic languages with the help of crowd-sourcing can be made smooth and seamless.

Agenda Introduction to Testing Challenges in Indic Languages Testing Challenges in Enablement Phase Decoding Enablement Challenges Using Linguistic Rules Testing Challenges in Integration Phase Solutions Takeaways

Introduction To Testing Challenges in Indic

Violation of Localization Industry Standards

Market Impact

3 Ts of Localization Industry

Example:

Testing Challenges in Enablement Phase

All Syllables/ Clustered Conjuncts Mono Syllables Bi or Di Syllables Tri Syllables Poly Syllables

Testing Challenges in Integration Phase Text Engine Fonts Keyboard

Integration Failure With Examples Hindi Telugu Kannada

Solutions Solutions Knowledge of Localization Industry Standards (3Ts) Bug fixing solution triage: Linguists & developers co-ordination Three eyes view process Early involvement of linguists at design phase Knowledge of Localization Industry Standards (3Ts)

Takeaways Due to Digital India campaign, Indic languages have huge potential and market value With the growing demand of Indic support, understanding & implementation of Indic testing will become very important Not just language, cultural & domain specific knowledge is also must

References & Appendix Logo Courtesy FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance (FICCI-ILIA) http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2013/09/07/india-speaks-780-languages-220-lost-in-last-50-years-survey/ https://www.microsoft.com/typography/OpenTypeDev/devanagari/intro.htm https://www-01.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/indic/summary.html

Author Biography Irfan Ahmad is a well experienced software QA for complex layout scripts (text), such as RTL (Right-To-Left), & Indic languages that are widely used in MENA (Middle East & North Africa) and South Asian Markets. He successfully helped Large ISVs such as Adobe to localize some of it’s flagship products, in MENA and south Asian markets. He has an M.Phil degree in software localization from JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University), New Delhi, one of India's premier institute for languages, culture, humanities and social sciences. He recently spoke to UN's general assembly in front of world leaders on how localization of technologies for all in their own native languages and promotion of multilingualism and multiculturalism will help UN achieve millennium sustainable development goals. He spoke to various other international forums like STC and EuroStar. He is Author - Researcher & Co-inventor of a software patent.

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