Categories: Languages & Cultures

Awesome L10n contributor: Marcelo, Reuben, and Fernando

Part of a series similar to the Awesome L10n Communities series where individual contributors are spotlighted for their efforts.

 

Marcelo Araldi, Reuben Morais, and Fernando Silveira

 

Nationality: Brazil
Languages: Portuguese
Role in L10n community:  Rueben – SUMO locale owner, Marcelo – SUMO peer, Fernando – websites

How did you get started with the Mozilla project?

RM: I’ve been with the project since January 2011. I basically clicked through the Get Involved page, specified localization as my interest, and ended up at SUMO.

MA: About 3 years ago I had no idea what  Mozilla was. I found and watched some talks from Chofmann and started talking to people from the Brazilian community about getting involved.

FS: Back in 2003 I was using Firefox. I knew it was already localized into Brazilian Portuguese, but the help wasn’t translated yet. I started looking for the Firefox localizer to get involved with localizing the help. SUMO didn’t exist back then, so I helped localize the help that came with Firefox.

 

What tips or tricks do you use for overcoming blocks and bugs in your L10n work?

RM: Depends on the area. In general, I try to work closely with the project owners for our locale.

MA: I mostly work with Verbatim. I mostly try to follow my dashboard and the email notifications I receive about updates to my projects and any bugs that are filed against them.

FS: I work mostly on websites so most of my work is done on web dashboard. Sometimes there are other projects that I help out with and that need our help to fix L10n bugs so we try to work together to resolve any issues and communicate a lot.

 

How do you help your team find new L10n contributors?

RM: One thing we’ve been doing is giving talks on localizing SUMO and gauging interest from those events.

FS: Like Reuben said, we give talks at universities and events like LatinoWare and try to recruit from there. We’ll even find places to do workshops and give tutorials on how to localize with Mozilla.

 

What’s your philosophy/method on mentoring new contributors?

MA: I try to start new contributors on Verbatim, cause it’s simple to learn and easy to sue. Once they become good at using Verbatim, I move them over to SUMO projects.

FS: It’s difficult and confusing for to teach some newcomers about localizing different projects (specifically the differences between localizing web projects and product projects), but we try to be as supportive and helpful as we can.

 

If you could identify several best practices that have helped you to become a successful Mozilla localizer, what would they be?

RM: A few best practices we try to follow: always avoid duplicating work! Double and triple check to make sure you’re not overwriting someone else’s work! I always ask for review to ensure good translation quality before checking in your work. Term consistency is important to us and it’s difficult to keep that consistency between SUMO, products, and websites. It would be really good to have a tool to manage and access terminology across those different projects.

FS: I’m really annoying because of how often I’m reviewing and editing translations, over and over again. I really try to check for details and consistency.

 

What projects are you most looking forward to working on this year?

RM: BrowserID has been really exciting! I’m also looking forward to Boot2Gecko, but I’m also shifting my focus to doing more coding.

MA: I’m helping translate ReMo for our website.

FS: Most of the time I enjoy localizing fun projects, like Firefox Flicks, but now I’m trying to focus more of my time on translating doc articles on SUMO and MDN.

 

 

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