Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: contribute end users

No Longer Lost in Translation

3 responses

9 popular extensions in 7 new locales

 

You might have noticed that while Firefox supports 90 languages, many extensions and their listings on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) are only available in English.

At present, we don’t have a way to connect extension developers with the translation community at scale, and  Pontoon, Mozilla’s tool for localizing products and websites, currently only supports translating the AMO site itself.

What we do have, however, is a desire to make translation resources available, a longstanding and active community of localizers, and friends on Mozilla’s Open Innovation team who specialize in putting the two together. Part of Open Innovation’s work is to explore new ways to connect communities of enthusiastic non-coding contributors to meaningful projects within Mozilla. Together with Rubén Martín, we ran a campaign to localize an initial group of top Firefox extensions into the 7 most popular languages of Firefox users.

More than 100 multilingual Mozillians answered the call for participation and submitted more than 140,000 translated words for these extensions using CrowdIn, a localization platform most recently used for Mozilla’s Common Voice project. These translations were reviewed by a core team of experienced localizers, who then provided approved translations to developers involved in the campaign to include in their next version update.

Now, you can enjoy this collection of extensions in Chinese (simplified), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian),  and Spanish:

1-Click Youtube Download* · Adblock for Firefox · Download Flash and Video
Greasemonkey · New Tab Override · NoScript Security Suite
Pinterest Save Button · signTextJS plus · To Google Translate

While this campaign is limited to a small group of extensions, we hope to roll out a localization process for all interested extension developers in the near future. Stay tuned for more information!

If you would like to participate in future campaigns at Mozilla, subscribe to Mission-Mozillians-Campaigns tag on Discourse to learn how to get involved. If you are specifically interested in localizing other content for Mozilla, check out the L10n wiki to learn how to get started.

Many thanks to the extension developers and localizers who participated in this campaign.

* Coming soon! If you would like a localized version of this extension in one of the languages listed above, install the extension now. During its next update, you will be automatically switched to the version for your locale.

3 comments on “No Longer Lost in Translation”

  1. Nathar Leichoz wrote on

    You already have a process whereby uploaded extensions are checked for correctness. Why not add a step where the check checks for the existence of a locale folder, which implies the author supports localization, then add a tag to the extension listing (like your firefox57 tag), saying “localizable”. Then users can directly contact the author via email to offer localizations.

    1. Caitlin Neiman wrote on

      That’s an interesting idea! Ideally, though, we’d like to be able to offer a tool that both developers and translators can use to support localization at scale. We might be able to incorporate some sort of tagging system in the future to signal which extensions are interested in receiving localization help from the community.

  2. Michael Wolf wrote on

    There is really an urgent need for a translation platform. Legacy add-ons were translated into many languages but WebExtensions are still very often in English only. Indeed, unfortunately some add-on developers do not make available strings to be translated. The minimum prerequisite is the _locales folder with the required messages.json file. An add-on developer told me, he will do that only when such a translation platform for extensions will be available again. Such a platform existed: Babelzilla. But, during the last time of its existence it had some issues and AFAIK there was a small team only that kept Babelzilla running. There are other solutions, too: Mig, the developer of the Video DownloadHelper extension, included a translation editor in VDH. Lusito built the tool web-ext-translator. Both, however, require individual initiative of add-on developers which must either include the VDH translation editor or make available the _locales folder with the file messages.json that web-ext-translator can load this file.