TESTON: LOCALIZATION MANAGEMENT & UXÂ REVIEWER
Teston is a remote unmoderated user testing platform from Norway. I was the Localization Manager for the French market responsible for their website and SaaS. This consisted in searching for and recruiting French translators, onboarding them, distributing tasks and overall overseeing the translation process. In addition, I was responsible for reviewing the French translations and making sure that they fit the UX context.
Interesting example
User research is not only useful for testing websites. It's also very important when making decisions in localization. When translating "you" from English into French, we often encounter a problem. Using the formal "vous" or the informal "tu" to express "you"? During the Teston localization, we ran into that exact same issue.
Being German myself, I thought the best option for maintaining Teston’s conversational and playful brand voice would be to use "tu". In German, for a younger brand, more often than not, it would be totally fine to use "Du" as it's very common nowadays in everyday life. We also went with this option for Teston’s German localization. I thought this would be the case for French as well. It turns out I was misled by my German thinking.
After consulting many French men and women in a survey (my UX brain made me do it), it appeared that "vous" was still largely preferred by them, especially on a website selling a professional service.