Responding to Walt’s rhetorical criticism

If you advance to the two minute thirty-five second point of this interview of Mitchell Baker and John Lilly, you’ll hear Walt Mossberg remark about the quality of Mozilla’s localizations by saying,

“I have a deep distrust of somebody who I don’t know to be actually responsible for the quality of the end product.”

We’ve heard that before, haven’t we?  To entertain the point, I’ll answer a question, “Just how do we know that our translated product is high quality?” by linking to several posts (with very brief summaries) as a response to Mossberg’s rhetorical criticism. 

• Testing the latest localized version of Firefox 3.5 — In this post, I ask our localizers to test a release, with specific steps that each locale can follow.
• Moving a locale out of beta — This is a basic software release principle.  No, our localizers don’t get a free pass into “official status”.  We give each locale a proper amount of time to bake so the beta users can provide feedback to our localizers.  After feedback is “triaged”, bugs are fixed, and signs of user adoption become obvious, we move a locale out of beta.
• Localization-QA survey results — At the end of 2008, we conducted a survey to gauge our teams’ testing efforts.  The posted results point us to where localizers might need our assistance.  From this, we have begun an experiment to provide a third-party QA service to help test a sample of our localized versions.
• Adding contextual information to a localized build –  Some of our localizers even create, share, and use customized tools to help perfect translations

Perhaps it’s hard to express without sounding naive or idealistic, but maybe there is an important theme that didn’t make Mossberg’s conversation that should be articulated:

We take localization very seriously.  This is not just a hobby for our community, and many have the battle scars to prove it.  Just ask someone who has stayed up all night to perfect a translation before a code freeze and you’ll understand what I am getting at.  Each of our localizers is keenly aware that greater than fifty percent of our end-users are NOT using an en-US version.  When a localizer is responsible for a translation, the quality of their work impacts a massive amount of end users.  We could ask our German localizer Kadir, whose localized version of Firefox is being used by an estimated twenty-five million people.  Or, Romi, our Indonesian localizer, who’s translated version has climbed to sixty-three percent market share.  That level of impact keeps our localizers sharp and tremendously dedicated.

Other highlights from the transcript:

“Walt: 71 of the foreign-language versions of Firefox are written by volunteers. Why should I use a product like that? Lilly says Mozilla has a system for verifying the quality of these other versions and vets them prior to release. Beyond that, users will alert the company to any problems.”

“Walt: Why wouldn’t it just be better for the consumer to go with the company that’s hired experts to do its translations? Baker: How much software do you really think is great? Walt: Not very much. Lilly: But it’s all written by experts. Walt nods, point taken.”

NB:  John Lilly mentions that we’ll have seventy-one localizations for Firefox 3.5.  We’re growing everyday!  We are actually going to ship seventy-three localizations for Firefox 3.5′s release candidate, with an outside chance of seventy-five for final release.