Open source shines at Localization World Seattle

As many of you know, Mozilla had the chance to attend and present sessions at one of the premiere localization industry events, Localization World Seattle (LocWorld). It was a great pleasure to participate in the conference and network with interesting people within the l10n industry. It was also a great success for both open source l10n and Mozilla’s l10n efforts.

 

Check out some of the greatness coming from our time at LocWorld:

 

L20n feedback
First, the audience in our session gave us great feedback and suggestions for L20n:
  • Create a central repository of common L20n files.
  • Too much coding, localizers are not software engineers.
  • Creatie a library of commonly used language macros for those who are not interested/able to create their own but still want to use L20n.
  • GALA and others interested in helping to develop and standardize L20n.
Pontoon feedback
Second, the audience also gave us great feedback for Pontoon:
  • Go backwards: in an admin panel, the Pontoon could be able to show where the string displays in the interface (Adobe was doing something similar by md5-hashing strings).
  • Character styles should be manageable when preforming in-context editing. Perhaps on the fly rendering of HTML added to the translated string.
General successes
Generally speaking, there were a lot of elements at LocWorld which combined to make the whole experience a great success. For example:
  • Both sessions received a lot of questions and interest. For our tools session, we had a Q&A session of about 30 minutes. We learned that this is apparently unusual for a LocWorld session. This session was considered one of the most engaging sessions of the whole conference.
  • A room moderator and conference program scheduler for LocWorld wants to institute an open source track for next year.
  • There are some industry publications and research firms interested in adding the Mozilla & open source perspective to their publications. We’ll have more to tell you about that in the future.
  • Several amazing organizations have expressed interest in contributing and collaborating with Mozilla and our l10n teams. Some of these are Translators without Borders, Amazon, and some language services providers (LSPs).
  • Overheard in the audience about Pontoon and L20n: “This is the future of l10n!”
  • The official theme of the event was ‘mobile,’ but all you could hear people talk about was crowdsourcing and community localization 🙂
We’re excited to continue to participate in these events and look forward to attracting more interest on our l10n community’s excellent work! If you have any questions about our experience, shoot us an email.

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