For globally active companies, a multilingual website is not a luxury, but a necessity. Providing content in English, German, French, and Italian, as is the case with one of our customers, is crucial for international reach. But this diversity brings with it considerable complexity in terms of quality assurance. How do you ensure that the language switch works on every page and that the correct translated content is actually loaded? More importantly, how do you build a test that doesn't immediately fail at the slightest editorial change to a headline?

The traditional approach is a real nightmare for maintenance and the reason why many automation projects fail. You could program a test script to check whether the English button “Read More” changes to the German “Mehr lesen” after switching. But what happens if the marketing team decides to optimize the German text to “Weiterlesen”? The “hard-coded” test fails – even though the language switching functionality itself is flawless. The result is a disaster: the QA team is bombarded with false reports, has to constantly make unnecessary test adjustments, and loses confidence in automation.

We solved this fundamental problem with an intelligent, flexible, and low-maintenance testing approach. Our task was to develop a test that checks the functionality of the language switch, not the exact string of a translation.

We have developed a dynamic, comparative test that ensures the robustness of internationalization (i18n) without relying on specific, constantly changing content.

The test begins by validating the technical switch to ensure that the basic mechanisms are working. It simulates clicking on a language switcher, for example from English to German, and immediately checks two critical technical markers in the background. It verifies whether the new URL contains the correct language abbreviation, such as /de/, and whether the lang attribute in the HTML code of the page has been correctly set to the new language, for example lang="de". This confirms beyond doubt that the server has correctly understood and processed the request for a different language.

This is followed by the innovative core of our solution: the intelligent, comparative content check. Instead of searching for hard-coded words, the test takes a much smarter approach. First, the script collects the text of key elements in the source language, for example English, such as the main heading and the text on important buttons. The test then switches the language, for example to German, as described above. Now the script navigates to exactly the same elements on the page and collects their text again. The decisive validation is no longer “Is the text ‘Read more’?” but rather: “Is the text of the English headline NOT EQUAL to the text of the German headline? Is the text of the English button NOT EQUAL to that of the German button?”

With this simple but ingenious comparison, the test ensures that a translation has been loaded without worrying about what it says exactly. Whether it says “Read more” or “Continue reading” is completely irrelevant for the functional test. The page has been translated—and that's all that matters.

The result is extremely robust and low-maintenance test automation. Customers can adapt and optimize translations and texts on their website at any time without having to worry about breaking the automated tests. The QA team is no longer alerted by false positives and can rest assured that a test failure indicates a genuine technical problem with the internationalization system, not a harmless text change. The reliability of the global website is thus ensured in a sustainable and efficient manner.

This use case is a prime example of the TESTIFY philosophy.

We don't build rigid scripts, but develop intelligent test logic tailored to our customers' real, agile processes. We create solutions that build trust and minimize maintenance costs instead of increasing them.

Do you also operate a multilingual application and struggle with fragile, maintenance-intensive tests?

We'll show you how intelligent test automation can stabilize your processes.

Are you facing similar challenges in ensuring the quality of your web application? Whether complex UI testing, data validation, or the automation of user flows—we will design a customized solution for you.