From Manual to Magical: Automating i18n tests for Global Users

When we first launched our product, our focus was clear — build the best experience possible for English-speaking users.

And it worked. The platform grew, our community thrived, and feedback poured in. But soon, we started noticing something: our user base wasn’t just in English-speaking regions anymore.

From a café owner in germany to a digital agency in São Paulo, customers around the world were discovering us — and they all shared one simple request:

“Can I use your platform in my language?”

That moment changed everything.

The Spark That Started It All

Expanding globally isn’t just about adding a few translation strings — it’s about understanding the heart of your users. Language shapes experience, trust, and accessibility.

We realized that if our platform didn’t speak the customer’s language, it didn’t truly speak to them. So, we made a decision that would redefine how we built, tested, and shipped our product:

We adopted Internationalization (i18n) as a core product strategy. Click here for more info

But with great ambition came a new challenge — Testing.

The SDET’s Dilemma: When Manual Testing Becomes a Maze

As an SDET, our world revolves around precision, consistency, and quality.
But when you’re testing internationalization manually — across 100's of pages, in 12+ languages — it quickly became a bottleneck. It was time-consuming, inconsistent, and prone to human error.

Imagine logging in, switching languages, reloading the platform, scanning for hardcoded English text, taking screenshots, logging bugs, and repeating that — for every language, every release.
It’s exhausting. And despite our best efforts, small translation issues still found their way into production.

Something had to change.
We realized we needed a scalable, automated way to detect and fix i18n issues before they ever reached our users. And that’s when our i18n Automation journey began.

The Breakthrough: Automating i18n Testing

That’s when the idea struck — what if we could automate it all?

We built a powerful i18n Automation Framework designed to detect untranslated or hardcoded English content automatically.
Here’s how it works behind the scenes:

1. Login Automation – It authenticates into the platform and navigates like a real user.

2. Language Switching – Updates the PlatformLanguage via API to the target locale.

3. Smart Page Validation – Loads pages dynamically, scans for English text, and flags untranslated strings.

4. Reporting – Generates visual and CSV reports (with screenshots) to pinpoint exactly where issues exist.

5. Reset – Reverts the language back to English automatically after checks are done.

All this happens seamlessly — across 12 locales, including French (fr-fr, fr-ca), Portuguese (pt-pt, pt-br), Spanish, German, and more.

Why This Matters

This wasn’t just about saving testing time — though it did that, too.
It was about respecting every customer’s experience, no matter where they are or what language they speak.

Imagine landing on a website in a language you don’t understand. You’re eager to explore, but half the buttons are in English, a few labels are missing translations, and some error messages look… well, lost in translation.
Frustrating, right?

That’s exactly the experience we wanted to eliminate for our global customers. From a user’s perspective, the expectation is simple: every interaction with our platform — from dashboards to pages — should feel native, natural, and fully available in their preferred language. Anything less feels incomplete.

Here’s what our automation achieved:

• Caught issues early — before they ever reached production.

• Saved QA hours — freeing testers from repetitive manual work.

• Enabled consistent localization — ensuring the same quality for every user, everywhere.

Now, every release ships with confidence — and with every new market we reach, the framework scales effortlessly.

Because great products don’t just translate — they connect.