Meet the team: Sara Guédiche, LQA test lead

Today we sit down with one of Alpha CRC’s own LQA test leads, Sara Guédiche, who specializes in testing for French.

Sara, thanks so much for joining us today. Could you talk us through your typical work day as a test lead?

Sure. I usually start my day as a tester. We have a lot of very short deadlines to keep track of, so I start by getting those out of the way. Depending on the client, we either work on screenshots or directly in the UI, but generally, I get French web pages to check against the source pages.

I look out for linguistic issues (an error in translation, a typo, an inconsistency…), internationalization errors (wrong formats or errors in plural or gender implementation), or functional issues (missing or untranslated content, truncations…), keeping an eye out for any problems on the page, and report anything that looks off. Once that’s done, I either tackle any ongoing long-term testing projects or translation requests, or I move on to lead work.

Depending on which stage of the project we’re currently at, that essentially involves creating all the instructions and materials for the testers, helping them with any issues or questions they may have (which can pop up at any point throughout the day), or preparing the deliverables to send back to the client.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

For me, it’s definitely the variety. LQA offers opportunities to evolve quite quickly within the team, which usually involves continuing to be a tester while taking on more responsibility. As someone who likes keeping busy, being a test lead allows me to juggle many different things every day, and discover the “behind-the-scenes” of tester work, which is interesting.

I get to talk to everyone, be it other test leads, testers, or clients, and there’s a lot of problem-solving involved. Whenever I’ve got any free time, I also take on tasks from other teams, which has allowed me to get a glimpse of most clients Alpha works with and perform all kinds of tasks, from subtitling to translation or even AI testing.

How did you get started in localization?

I graduated in 2023 with a Master’s in Linguistics. I wasn’t sure what to do with it at first: some of my coursemates stayed in academia or went the Computational Linguistics/AI route, while others branched out and went for more general consulting or data analysis roles. Personally, I knew I wanted to continue working with languages.

As a fresh 21-year-old graduate, I found it difficult to get my foot in the door before I even got a chance to show what I had to offer. Alpha took the time to properly evaluate what I brought to the table, showed interest in the skills and experience I had to offer, and gave me a chance.

I wasn’t really familiar with LQA until I found the job listing, which ticked a lot of boxes. You mainly need two things to be a tester: great attention to detail, and an (ideally) native knowledge of the language and culture of the locale you’re testing for. I was eager to learn something new, and knew there were a lot of opportunities for internal growth.

If you could give one piece of advice to someone starting in this field, what would it be?

Make sure to keep up to date with current language trends. Language and culture change so quickly nowadays, and our translations need to keep up with them. Spending some time on social media can help with that. More generally, don’t lose touch with your native language.

If you’ve been using English in your daily life for a while, the two can start to mix together, or you won’t be quite as sure what sounds natural anymore, which is a big issue when your job is to ensure linguistic quality. Continue reading or watching movies in your language regularly so English doesn’t take over.

What’s your favourite word or phrase in another language, and why?

I love the word “Coucou” in French. It means “Hi”, and is literally just an imitation of the call of the cuckoo bird (think of the hourly cry of a cuckoo clock). It’s such a common word in France that I never really gave it any thought until I moved to the UK. My English friends took a few months to confess how odd they found us for calling out “Coucou!” to one another.

Do you have a memorable or funny story from your work in localization?

When I first started testing, I was doing quite a lot of work on video games. In LQA, that usually involves playing the game in order to display the content we need to check. What was supposed to be a 30-minute task turned into an entire afternoon of me desperately trying to kill this odd bull creature that refused to die and getting increasingly frustrated.

Asking for help only made things worse: the repeated assurance that it was really easy, and all I had to do was make him charge headfirst into a rock definitely didn’t help, since that’s what (I thought) I’d been doing all along. All of that to check a couple of sentences… Eventually, it turned out the level was stuck on a loop, unable to end. Not my most productive day, and I’m glad I haven’t had to do that in a while but it does show the effort we put in to make sure everything looks perfect to the very last apostrophe.

Can you share one of your favourite examples of localization? What makes it stand out to you?

I really like the French translation of the title of the movie The Corpse Bride. While a direct translation would have been entirely possible, the translators opted for a more evocative title: Les Noces Funèbres: roughly, “The Funeral Wedding.” This choice preserves the film’s central themes of marriage and death highlighted in the original title, but goes a step further by creating a striking juxtaposition between “wedding” and “funeral”, two sacred rituals that typically represent opposite ends of life’s spectrum (till death do us part…). The result is a beautifully ironic title that echoes the film’s spirit, where the boundaries between life and death blur, and where, paradoxically, more joy, warmth, and celebration are found among the dead than the living.

If you could instantly become fluent in any language, which would you choose and why?

Classical Arabic. My parents moved from Tunisia to France after school, and I was born and raised there. Tunisian culture was a huge part of my upbringing, and I speak the language fluently, but I never learned classical Arabic simply because I never went to school there. There are many perks to growing up in a bicultural household but one of the challenges is never belonging to either culture fully. It’s also never fun having to explain that while I speak Tunisian Arabic natively, I can’t properly communicate with Arabic speakers from different countries because I speak a dialect which may be similar, but also very different in many aspects. It’s also a beautiful, complex language spoken by so many, and mastering it would give me access to a whole new wealth of literature and poetry no translation does justice to (at least according to my dad).