Abstract:
The modern software development process has come to involve more and more of language
translation, especially, in the country whose mother tongue is not the English language. In
linguistics, translation often incurs loss of information which consequently results in loss of quality
of the translated content. In the software development process, the existence of such translation
factor has yet to be better studied and understood as per how it will likely affect the overall quality
of the software product. In that light, this paper examines such an impact on the overall quality of
the software product and attempts to find an optimal solution for it based on the waterfall software
development model. The paper takes into consideration the translation factors in each phase of the
waterfall software development model that could bring about information loss and cause the
deterioration of the overall software product quality. The mathematical model proposed in [7] and
the survey of professional opinions using the questionnaire are instrumental for this paper in finding
the relevant loss of quality in each of the development phases of the waterfall model. To optimize
the software development process where translation is involved, the paper further incorporates the
cost model from [9] into the analysis to better reflect the computed quality loss of software.