• Localization tools summary document

    August 19th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    Jesper Kristensen recently created a spreadsheet of the tools available to Mozilla localizers. The document can be found by following this link.

    I found this summary to be very valuable because Jesper asks a lot of great questions about each tool.  He then formatted the responses to allow for a visual comparison of the tools.  The document has columns filled out with the following information:

    • Name
    • Description of the tool
    • Author(s)
    • User Interface
    • Used by
    • Requires install?
    • Requires account?
    • Pull / checkout
    • Push / checkin
    • Glossary
    • Translation memory
    • Show missing strings
    • Automated testings
    • Calculate % done
    • File formats
    • Preserve file layout
    • Create language pack
    • Links / more info

    I’m writing about this because if you know of other tools or use other tools, you might want to contact Jesper or add it to this list yourself.  Jesper posted this to the localization mailing list, so hopefully those who are not a part of that list can contribute if they know of other tools used by Mozilla localizers.

    Eventually, we will need to add Verbatim, which is being developed by Wil Clouser and others in the Mozilla Community.  Also to be added one day soon is Silme, which is being developed by Zbigniew Braniecki (Gandalf on IRC) and Adrian Kalla.

    If you have any questions, please ask.  For instance some of the terms above may not be familiar to you.  If so, just ask, and we’ll respond in the comments of this post.

  • Mozilla’s L10n Dashboard

    July 22nd, 2008 by seth bindernagel with Comments Off

    Check out this tool from Pike.  He calls it the l10n dashboard.  It’s a great snapshot into the state of Mozilla l10n community.  I’d say it’s a work in progress with a way to go, but so far, it’s very well put together.

    As our team tries to improve efficiency and outreach/service to localizers in our l10n process, this tool will greatly help in how we focus on and respond to community needs related to localization.

    My best suggestion is to click through and start playing with it, asking questions along the way on this blog.  We can help explain what might be unclear.

    But, here’s a brief set of some of the things you can do to get you started.

    Main Page

    The landing page is all 65 localizations that are presently a part of Mozilla’s build process.  This does not mean we ship 65 localizations…it means that they are in CVS and can be built nightly and tested.  Nota bene, this does not include language packs.

    Top navigation of the table

    Each column header is sortable.  (Do we need to make that more clear?  Not sure if it’s clear to me at first glance that you can play with this chart.)  The first column is the language code and it is sorted alphabetically, with af (Afrikaans) first.

    The second column is titled “Tree” and two values:  “trunk” and “incubator”.  Trunk means the builds are on the Firefox 3.0 trunk in CVS.  Incubator means that we need to migrate the locales over to 3.0.  When I saw this, I immediately began to ask, “What have we done to reach out directly to those locales in the incubator to see what we can to do to get them onto the trunk?”  We’re working on it…

    The next column is a “percentage complete/changed”.   You might ask, how could anything ship with anything less that 100% complete?  Or,  what does “complete/changed” actually mean?  Let me give an example.  Someone in the es-AR localization may not have a translation for a country name of an island located in the Pacific ocean.  That string will not be changed.  But, it doesn’t mean that es-AR cannot ship a near-perfect version of Firefox for its users.  Does that make sense?  There are lots of entities in our code that just are not going to have a translation in some locales.

    The “missing” columns shows you all the locales that will not build because they have missing pieces that need translation.  If you sort on missing to show all the builds that have missing values, you’ll see that it is the same number as the “failure” link, which is just under “success”.  This means that those localizations teams are working very hard to get their builds ready to ship in 3.0.2 (or later)…or that they have yet to be migrated over to Firefox 3 and still haven’t finished localizing Firefox 2.

    Other stuff

    On the right side, you’ll see a bunch of boxes.  Click around with those and you’ll start to see how we are trying to manage our own capacity and work flow.  Sadly, we are not automatons (Ken Kovash is the only robot at Mozilla), so we need to figure out where we can help our localizers.

    Click “reset all filters” at the top.  Then, in the bottom box on the right hand side called “Shipped in…”, click on “Missing this field…”  You’ll see 17 localizations that have not shipped in Firefox 3.  Bingo!  This is the focal point.  How do we get these 17 into Firefox 3??  We’ve reached out directly to a lot of these in the past four weeks, making time for personal IRC meetings, emails, IMs, etc.  Check out bug 442935.  After these meetings, we landed 8 new languages with this bug to the build process.  In total, ten new localizations have been added in the recent past.  We’re making progress and have a lot to do like working with communities to get the localizations ready to ship.   If you’re in the dashboard’s “list of 17″ and haven’t heard from us, we’ll probably ping you soon.  But, don’t hesitate to contact us because we want to hear from you.

    Pike, Mic, Pascalc, Chofmann, and I talk almost daily on how we can improve this dashboard.  It’s really a great tool and much, muCH, MUCH thanks to Pike and Pascalc for putting this together.  If you have ideas, I’d really encourage you to participate.  This is a perfect chance to get involved and make your ideas a part of the future of Mozilla l10n.

  • compare-locales

    July 10th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 10 comments »

    You may have noticed in the past few months that I have been writing more and more about Mozilla l10n and our tools development process.

    In addition, over the last two weeks, I’ve set up a handful of meetings with localizers from several Indic languages who have been poking us to find out what they need to do to start buidling, testing, and eventually shipping a localized version of Firefox 3.  Mic has also been reaching out to localizer groups to set up team-to-team meetings and overall, I think it has been successful.

    One thing I saw repeatedly in those meetings that seemed particularly helpful was Pike using his compare-locales tool that he developed that shows the progress of a localization compared to the current en-US source code.

    So, last Friday, I decided to learn how to use this tool so I might be able to help Pike steer localizers to where work needs to be done….and along the way, comment on the pain points.  Here is what I did and learned:

    I went to MDC and looked up how to run compare-locales.  Pike wrote this documentation and it was really helpful.

    After reading through this, my first task was to figure out if I had Python installed.  In fact, I did.  Version 2.5.1.  I checked in with Pike and he told me that he had tested compare-locales with versions of Python 2.3, so I knew I was ok.  To run this, you’ll need 2.3 or higher.

    With Python installed, I had to check to see if I had easy_install on my machine.  And, I lucked out again!  I had it installed on my machine.  Pike gives some good documentation on how to get easy_install if you don’t have it.

    I then ran the following command from the shell:

    # Install “compare-locales”.  ”easy_install compare-locales”

    But, this failed.  I hit my first pain point.  For some reason, I was not able to install to the directory /usr/local/bin.  I asked for a bit of help from one of these developer guys and ran the following:

    $ mkdir /Users/bindernagel/bin
    $ export PYTHONPATH=/Users/bindernagel/bin
    $ easy_install –install-dir=/Users/bindernagel/bin compare-locales

    Success.  Thanks, Seth Spitzer.

    I then had to get the en-US source code for the browser.  This was kind of a big deal for me here…checking out the Mozilla source for Firefox for the first time…well, I thought it was cool…now I can build my own version of Firefox one day.

    (I’ll attach the MDC doc I used to do this and the commands I ran in the comment section of this blog post.)

    Once I had the browser source from CVS locally, I had to get all the localizations for Firefox.  This was another pain point.  I didn’t really know how to find ALL localizations, which I what I needed if I wanted to be helpful to localizers. This was the last pain point.  But, I got a bit more help and we found this:

    $ make -f client.mk l10n-checkout MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser MOZ_CO_LOCALES=all

    If I were to make an addition to the MDC doc about compare-locales, I might put this line, or a locale-specific command in the instructions.

    Once I had this, I was able to run my first compare-locale.  I chose German (de) and here was the output in my terminal prompt:

    keys: 900
    unchanged: 659
    changed: 4427
    87% of entries changed

    This is a summary of the localization of the team from Germany.

    • Keys are access keys typically (DTD files) that need some localization.
    • Unchanged are strings that are in en-US that do not need to be changed.
    • Changed gives the number of strings localized by the team

    When I ran this compare-locale, de was complete.  If de needed more localization work, a list of files would have been given.

    Ping me if you want to learn how to do this.  If you already do, please list the pain points you experienced when trying to do this yourself.  I’ll gather those and amend the MDC document accordingly (with approval from Pike).

  • Another post about Localizing Firefox 3

    June 26th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 3 comments »

    Spanish localizer, Guillermo López (IRC nick: willyaranda), pinged me this morning on IRC, pointing me to a post he wrote about his experience localizing Firefox 3.

    willyaranda is the browser module owner for es-ES and, along with other members of the Spanish team like Ricardo Palomares, is responsible for that localization.  Great work and thank you!

    Also interesting about this write-up, willyaranda describes his experience using the l10n tool, Mozilla Translator.

    Here is his story.

  • Translate.org.za bug day

    June 19th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    Passing this along to Planet for anyone who wants to participate in a bug day with Translate.org.za.

    Hallo everybody:

    The Translate project will be having a bug day on Friday 20 June. We want to invite people to join us in testing, fixing, documenting, and enjoying our tools and discussing some ideas. Many of you might now want to focus your attention on Thunderbird 3, your favourite plugins, or whatever else.  You are all welcome.

    How does it work

    For most of the day interested people will gather in #pootle on irc.freenode.net and try to tackle a bug, improve some piece of documentation or just be helpful to anybody else trying to do something with Pootle or the Translate Toolkit.

    Many of us are in timezones similar to European timezones, so that might determine when most activity can be expected – but feel free to pop in at any time.

    For more information about our project, please check the website with information for users and developers:

    http://translate.sourceforge.net/

    Specifically, bugs are reported here:

    http://bugs.locamotion.org/

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