L10n Report: September Edition

Théo Chevalier

No responses yet

Please note some of the information provided in this report may be subject to change as we are sometimes sharing information about projects that are still in early stages and are not final yet.

Welcome!

New localizers

Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!

New community/locales added

In the past weeks we’ve added several languages to Pontoon, in particular from the Mozilla Nativo project:

  • Mixteco Yucuhiti (meh)
  • Mixtepec Mixtec (mix)
  • Quechua Chanka (quy)
  • Quichua (qvi)

We’ve also started localizing Firefox in Interlingua (ia), while Shuar (jiv) will be added soon for Firefox for Android.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

A few deadlines are approaching:

  • September 13 is the last day to make changes to Beta projects.
  • September 20 is merge day, and all strings move from Central to Beta. There are currently a few discussions about moving this date, but nothing has been decided yet. We’ll communicate through all channels if anything changes.

Photon in Nightly is almost ready for Firefox 57, only a few small changes need to land for the onboarding experience. Please make sure to test your localization on clean profiles, and ask your friend to test and report bugs like mistranslations, strings not displayed completely in the interface, etc.

What’s new or coming up in Test Pilot

Firefox Send holds the record for the highest number of localizations in the Test Pilot family (with SnoozeTabs), with 38 languages completely translated.

For those interested in more technical details, Pontoon is now committing localizations for the Test Pilot project in a l10n branch. This also means that the DEV server URL has changed. Note that the link is also available in the project resources in Pontoon.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

  • Have you noticed that Photon is slowly but surely arriving on Firefox for Android Nightly version? The app is getting a visual refresh and things are looking bright and shiny! There’s a new onboarding experience, icons are different, the awesome bar has never been this awesome, tabs have a new look… and the whole experience is much smoother already! Come check it out.
  • Zapoteco and Belarussian are going to make it to release with the upcoming Firefox Android 56 release.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

  • Mozilla.org:
    • This past month, we continued the trend of creating new pages to replace the old ones, with new layout and color scheme.  We will have several new pages in the work in September.  Some are customized for certain markets and others will have two versions to test the markets.
    • Thanks to all the communities that have completed the new Firefox pages released for localization in late June. The pages will be moved to the new location at Firefox/… replacing the obsolete pages.
    • Germany is the focused market with a few more customized pages than other locales.
    • New pages are expected for mobile topic in September and in early October. Check web dashboard and email communications for pending projects.
  • Snippets: We will have a series snippets campaigns starting early September targeting users of many Mozilla products.
  • MOSS: the landing page is made available in Hindi in time for the partnership announcement on August 31 along with a press release.
  • Legal: Firefox Privacy Notice will be rewritten.  Once localization is complete in a few locales, we invite communities to review them.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

  • Our call tool at changecopyright.org is live! Many thanks to everyone who participated in the localization of this campaign, let’s call some MEPs!
  • The IoT survey has been published, and adding new languages plus snippets made a huge difference. You can learn more in the accomplishments section below.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

  • Check out the brand new Pontoon Tools Firefox extension, which you can install from AMO! It brings notifications from Pontoon directly to your Firefox, but that’s just the beginning. It also shows you your team’s statistics and allows you to search for strings straight from Mozilla.org and SUMO. A huge shout out to its creator Michal Stanke, a long time Pontoon user and contributor!
  • We changed the review process by introducing the ability to reject suggestions instead of deleting them. Each suggestion can now be approved, unreviewed or rejected. This will finally make it easy to list all suggestions needing a review using the newly introduced Unreviewed Suggestions filter. To make the filter usable out of the box, all existing suggestions have been automatically rejected if an approved translation was available and approved after the suggestion has been submitted. The final step in making unreviewed suggestions truly discoverable is to show them in dashboards. Thanks to Adrian, who only joined Pontoon team in July and already managed to contribute this important patch!
  • Pontoon homepage will now redirect you to the team page you make most contributions to. You can also pick a different team page or the default Pontoon homepage in your user settings. Thanks to Jarosław for the patch!
  • Editable team info is here! If you have manager permission, you can now edit the content of the Info tab on your team page:

  • Most teams use this place to give some basic information to newcomers. Thanks to Axel, who started the effort of implementing this feature and Emin, who took over!
  • The notification popup (opened by clicking on the bell icon) is no longer limited to unread notifications. Now it displays the latest 7 notifications, which includes both – read and unread. If there are more than 7 unread notifications, all are displayed.
  • Sync with version control systems is now 10 times faster and uses 12 times less computing power. Average sync time dropped from around 20 minutes to less than 2.
  • For teams that localize all projects in Pontoon, we no longer pull Machinery suggestions from Transvision, because they are already included in Pontoon’s internal translation memory. This has positive impact on Machinery performance and the overall string navigation performance. Transvision is still enabled for the following locales: da, de, es-ES, it, ja, nl, pl.
  • Thanks to Michal Vašíček, Pontoon logo now looks much better on HiDPI displays.
  • Background issues have been fixed on in-context pages with a transparent background like the Thimble feature page.
  • What’s coming up next? We’re working on making searching and filtering of strings faster, which will also allow for loading, searching and filtering of strings across projects. We’re also improving the experience of localizing FTL files, adding support for using Microsoft Terminology during the translation process and adding API support.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

  • Community Marketing Kit: showcases ways to leverage existing marketing content, resort to approved graphic asset, and utilize social channels to market Mozilla products in your language.
  • AMO: details the product development cycle that impacts localization. AMO frontend will be revamped in Q4. The documentation will be updated accordingly.
  • Snippets: illustrates the process on how to create locale relevant snippet, or launch snippet in languages that is not on the default snippet locale list.
  • SUMO: covers the process to localize the product, which is different from localizing the articles.

Events

  • Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Reach out to any l10n-driver and we’ll include that (see links to emails at the bottom of this report)

 

Accomplishments

We would like to share some good results

Responses by country (not locale), for the 32,000 responses to the privacy survey ran by the Advocacy team back in March, localized in French and German:

It was good, but now let’s compare that with the responses by country for our IoT survey How connected are you? that received over 190,000 responses! We can see that the survey performed better in France, Germany and Italy than in the US. Spanish is underrepresented because it’s spread across several countries, but we expect the participation to be similar. These major differences are explained by the fact that we added support for three more languages, and promoted it with snippets in Firefox. This will give us way more diverse results, so thanks for your hard work everyone! This also helped get new people subscribed to our newsletter, which is really important for our advocacy activities, to fuel a movement for a healthier Internet.
The survey results might also be reused by scientists and included in the next edition of the Internet Health Report How cool is that? Stay tuned for the results.

 

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

  • Kabyle (kab) organized a Kab Mozilla Days on August, 18-19 in Algeria, discussing localization, Mozilla mission, open source and promotion of indigenous languages.
  • Triqui (trs) community has made significant progress post Asunción workshop, Triqui is now officially supported on mozilla.org. Congratulations!!
  • Wolof (wo): Congrats to Ibra and Ibra (!) who have been keeping up with Firefox for Android work. They have now been added to multi-locale builds, which means they reach release at the same time as Firefox 57! Congrats guys!
  • Eduardo (eo): thanks for catching the mistake in a statement appeared on mozilla.org. The paragraph has been since corrected, published and localized.
  • Manuel (azz) from Spain and Misael (trs) from Mexico met for the first time at the l10n workshop in Asunción, Paraguay. They bonded instantly! Misael will introduce his friends who are native speakers of Highland Puebla Nahuatl, the language Manuel is working on all by himself. He can’t wait to be connected with these professionals, to collaborate, and promote the language through Mozilla products.

 

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact on of the l10n-drivers and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out (see list at the bottom)!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

 

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve by reaching out to any one of the l10n-drivers listed above.

 

L10n Style Guides on GitHub

Kekoa Riggin

No responses yet

When we began talking about style guides with localization communities at l10n hackathons, we suggested that the Mozilla Wiki was a good place to temporarily store them, until we could define a more centralized and accessible place for them, and that that place would most likely be GitHub. After a lot of research, we’ve created GitHub repository to host all of the Mozilla translation style guides, including community-specific ones. Any style guide that is referenced on a team’s contact page has been copied as a markdown file into this repository. The repository has been built with Gitbooks and the style guides can be accessed with greater readability and improved search capabilities.

You may be wondering, “If the community style guides are already available and linked on team contact pages, why do we need this GitHub repository?” We understand this confusion and wish to address why the repository exists. 

Recently, MDN underwent a major style and content change. This meant that the General Localization Style Guide that was available on MDN needed to be assessed to determine what changes needed to be made or if MDN was even a good home for it. After considering alternatives and associated questions, such as “what about community-specific style guides”, we decided that we need to build a place easy to find for all style guides. Having this central repository for all style guides makes it easier to locate all of the style guides that have been created by each community. We don’t want the hard work to go to waste, that’s why we want to make these style guides accessible and link to them from the team’s page in Pontoon. This centralized repository helps us make sure we don’t miss any style guides.

Currently, community style guides are hosted on a variety of sources and in a mix of formats. While this is not a problem in itself, these varied formats and sources can make it difficult to locate the style guides. Additionally, some of these sources stop hosting the style guide or the style guide may become obsolete for whatever reason. This is not exclusive to style guides hosted to non-Mozilla sources. The wiki at mozilla.org doesn’t represent a good home for this data, for that reason we have moved the General Localization Style Guide as well. Rather than lose the style guides currently hosted on the Mozilla Wiki, we decided to make copies of these style guides in the centralized GitHub Repository.

These considerations aren’t new—as you probably know from the past year’s workshops—but they present an opportunity for us to make this change that will facilitate quality assurance and accessibility for our translation efforts.

This brings up a few tasks for language communities that have a style guide or would like to add one to the repository:

  1. Please check that your current community style guide is in the repository and that it is correct. It is possible that the style guide that was migrated to the repository is the wrong version or contains some errors from migration. If there are any errors in the style guide, please see number 2.
  2. If you need to update/correct or add a style guide to the repository, please update it in the GitHub repository. GitHub has instructions on how to update a repository. Please follow these instructions to create a pull request. This pull request will be reviewed before being merged to the official style guides repository to try to maintain quality. In addition, each pull request should be reviewed by another member of the community as some of the repository administrators may not speak the language of the style guide. 

If there are any questions regarding the new repository or community style guides, please direct them to Kekoa kriggin@mozilla.com or flod at flodolo@mozilla.com.

Making unreviewed suggestions easier to find

Matjaž Horvat

No responses yet

Translation review is the vital part of localization. The first step of each review process is to find suggestions that haven’t been reviewed yet. Since this fundamental task can be quite tedious in Pontoon, we’re making it better!

Problem

You can easily filter the so called Suggested strings, which have at least one suggestion, but none of them have been approved yet. Those are definitely suggestions you should review.

But there might be others, which are harder to find.

If a string has an approved translation and a few suggestions, when a new suggestion comes, it’s almost impossible to discover it. You can use the Has Suggestions filter, which lists all strings with at least one suggestion, but you will not be able to distinguish the new suggestion from the already reviewed ones.

To overcome this drawback, you can delete all suggestions that you decide not to approve and then the Has Suggestions filter will only show strings with unreviewed suggestions. But deleting translations in not a good practice if we want to keep translation history and user statistics accurate.

Solution

Today, we’re removing the ability to delete translations and adding the ability to reject them. A translation can be rejected explicitly with a click on the reject icon or as part of a mass action. When a suggestion is approved or an approved translation is submitted, all remaining suggestions automatically become rejected.

The three review states: approved, unreviewed, rejected

The three review states: approved, unreviewed, rejected.

That means we’re effectively splitting translations into 3 groups – approved, unreviewed and rejected, which allows us to introduce the Unreviewed Suggestions filter. This filter finally makes it easy to list all suggestions needing a review.

Important note: To make the filter usable out of the box, all existing suggestions have been automatically rejected if an approved translation was available and approved after the suggestion has been submitted. Without this change, many locales would end up with thousands of unreviewed suggestions.

The final step in making unreviewed suggestions truly discoverable is to show them in dashboards. We’ll fix that as part of bug 1377969. Also, we’ll be updating the documentation soon to reflect these changes.

Adrian

A huge shout-out to Adrian Gaudebert who contributed the patch. Adrian joined the Pontoon team in July and is a long time web developer at Mozilla. He helped with Elmo in the past and most recently worked on Mozilla Crash Reports. We can’t wait to see what inventions he comes up with next!

Create a localized build locally

Axel Hecht

No responses yet

Yesterday we changed the way that you create localized builds on mozilla-central.

This works for developers doing regular builds, as well as developers or localizers without a compile environment. Sadly, users of artifact builds are not supported.

For language packs, a mere

./mach build langpack-de

will work. If you’d rather wish to build a localized package, you’ll want to get the package first. If you’re building yourself, that’s

./mach package

and if you want to get a Nightly build from archive.mozilla.org, just

./mach build wget-en-US

If you want to do that for Firefox for Android, you’ll need to specify which platform you want. Set EN_US_BINARY_URL to the latest-mozilla-central-* path for the binary you want to test.

And then you just

./mach build installers-fr

That’ll take care about getting the french l10n repository, and do all the necessary things to get you a nice little installer/package in dist. Pick your favorite language from our repositories. Care for a RTL build? ./mach installers-fa will get you a Persian one 😉 .

As with other repositories we clone into ~/.mozbuild, you’ll want to update those every now and then. They’re in l10n-central/*, a repository for each language you tried.

Documentation is on gecko.rtd, bugs go here. This works for Firefox, Firefox for Android, and Thunderbird.

And now you can safely forget all the things you never wanted to know about localized builds.

L10n Report: August Edition

Delphine

No responses yet

Please note some of the information provided in this report may be subject to change as we are sometimes sharing information about projects that are still in early stages and are not final yet.

Welcome!

New localizers

Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!

Important updates

Mozilla’s Pootle instance is closing down on September 1st, we’ll move existing active localizations to Pontoon. Read this blog post if you’re interested in more details.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

New content to localize for Firefox desktop is mostly focusing around two areas:

  • Onboarding experience (tour and in-product notifications).
  • Preferences reorganization.

While the Onboarding experience will be an ongoing effort, with content updates between versions of Firefox, the reorganization of preferences should be mostly completed (and it was a complex problem to solve). Unfortunately, another consistent change landed right before merge day for preferences, finally bringing some terminology consistency (website vs site).

In the meantime, still a lot of visible changes in the UI are happening in Firefox, as part of the ongoing Photon project.

Activity Stream (the redesigned about:newtab) is currently scheduled to ship in Firefox 57, with some locales tested as an experiment in 56 (A/B study), while Firefox Screenshots is still scheduled to ship with Firefox 55 for all locales (staged rollout during August, with an increasing number of users receiving the feature over time).

What’s new or coming up in Test Pilot

Test Pilot launched 3 new experiments, two of them are localizable in Pontoon.

Notes adds a simple one-page notepad in Firefox sidebar, to store notes while browsing the web.

Firefox Send, on the other hand, is the first stand-alone web service distributed as part of Test Pilot: it’s a website where you can upload a file, encrypt it and obtain a link to share it. Once the file has been downloaded (or within 24 hours), it gets removed from the server. Basically, a one-time, secure file sharing website that will work with any browser, not just Firefox.

The third project, currently available only for English, is called Voice Fill, and lets you talk with search engines (Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo), using AI for speech recognition.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

  • Greek (el) and Lao (lo) are reaching release version of Firefox for Android with Firefox 55 release (today is merge day, next week is the launch). Congratulations! You can download Firefox for Android here.
  • Belarusian (be) and Zapoteco (zam) are now shipping in the Play Store! They’ll reach release with Firefox for Android 56. Congratulations! Try them out on Beta now.
  • More than 1,000,000 Focus for Android downloads! Impressive! If you still haven’t tried it out, come get it here!
  • We have 12 new locales ready to go for Focus iOS v3.4! Afrikaans (af), Danish (da), Greek (el), Spanish from Mexico (es-MX), Hindi (hi-IN), Malay (ms), Romanian (ro), Tamil (ta), Telugu (te), Tagalog (tl), Urdu (ur), and Uzbek (uz). Congratulations! You can try out Focus for iOS here.
  • We are now moving to a bi-weekly cadence for both Focus projects. Check out what that means for l10n by looking at the Focus iOS schedule here and the Focus Android schedule here. In fact, our releases will be schedule driven rather than dictated by feature development progress. Both features and fixes will be allocated to the next available release upon completion. This will give us the ability to respond much more quickly to bug reports and user feedback.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

  • Mozilla.org continues its makeover to position for the new Firefox launch in autumn with new content and the new templates. Since our last report, nine web pages appeared on your web project dashboard. We have a few more in the work, so stay tuned. Keep an eye on the replacement pages and the web dashboard for pending projects.
  • Germany and Taiwan are two of the focused markets for the Firefox campaigns. The communities have more content than others to localize. Additionally, they are adjusting their localization process in order to include multiple parties in this collaborative effort.
  • Snippets: The August campaign focuses on Test Pilot, in time for the rollout of new features.
  • Community Participation Guide is localized in 6 locales: de, es, fr, hi-IN, pt-BR and zh-TW. We are working on an amendment. These communities will need to review the update once the updates are localized.
  • The Firefox Privacy Notice has been revised continuously in the last few months. The document is localized in select locales. If your community has the bandwidth and/or expert knowledge in legal language, please review the document.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

  • Changecopyright.org will get a content update over the summer! The website will get a clear timeline of events for the Copyright reform and it should be easier to take action. We are also investigating the addition of a call tool so that people can directly call their MEPs to be real copyfighters, so stay tuned!
  • The IoT survey has been localized in de, es, fr, it, pt-BR and we’re launching it very soon! We’re supporting a few more locales than with the previous survey, and are expecting to get even more people taking it! 💪
  • Fundraising update: we’re looking into supporting SEPA transfers! It’s a very long process due to bank regulations, and we can’t guarantee anything yet, but we’re trying hard to get it set up this year. This means your contributions will help us raise even more money to create an Open Internet movement, as wire transfers are the #1 request from European people to our donor support team. Oh, and we’re supporting a few more currencies, check it out!

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

  • Terminology management (WIP) is coming quickly to Pontoon, starting with terminology suggestions in translate view. Check-out this mock-up!

Newly published localizer facing documentation

Kekoa – our tireless intern – is working on documenting how to use the translation interface in Pontoon.

Events

  • The Telugu L10n Meetup happened last weekend in Hyderabad, it’s a joint event by Mozilla, Swecha and Telugu Wikipedia. We can’t wait to know how it went!

Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Reach out to any l10n-driver and we’ll include that (see links to emails at the bottom of this report)

Localization impact in numbers

  • Snippets currently support 8 locales and has recently tested in 4 RTL languages. Thanks to the communities who support this time sensitive and high priority project request on a monthly basis. We’d like to share some high-level Q2 snippet metrics with you:
    • Impressions: Localized snippets received approximately 1,471,993,100 impressions in Q2. 35% of world-wide snippet impressions were non-en.
    • Clicks: approximately 2,869,700 (44% of snippet clicks).
    • Average CTR (click through rate): .21% (.03%) higher than our en audience.
    • Average block rate: .21% (only .01% higher than en block rate)
  • The fundraising campaign has not even started ramping up that we already have some positive numbers to share with you 🙂 Here’s how much the top fundraising locales helped us raise money for Mozilla since January, so you can expect these numbers to get much higher very soon!
    • de: $18,837
    • fr: $16,669
    • es: $5,454
    • it: $3,044
    • ru: $1,769
    • ar: $1,572
    • nl: $1,129

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

  • Rodrigo single-handedly worked on Zapoteco (zam) on Firefox for Android – which is going to ship with Firefox 56. A warm thank you for all this effort!
  • Elio joined the Italian l10n team volunteering to localize Thimble, he’s been keeping up with this task until the present day with passion and perseverance. More recently he joined the Mozilla Italia L10n Guide project, part of the Open Leadership Training initiative, and contributed to the translation of the Internet Health website.
  • Congratulations to the Greek team for reaching the goal of zero missing strings in Firefox. It’s been a long and adventurous journey.
    • Special shout-out to Jim, who has made possible with his massive contribution to catch up on most of the Mozilla projects (Firefox etc).
    • Another special shout-out to Mike who has joined the team recently and is making great suggestions! Welcome 🙂
  • Thanks to Georgianizator for doing a great job in localizing several projects in Georgian (ka).
  • Othman Wagiman leads the Malay community making significant progress in all products and projects, turning the project dashboard on Pontoon from gray to green. Impressive!!!
  • Ton of the Dutch team identified quite a few inconsistencies in the usages of the most common phrases in our recent web project copies. His feedback is greatly appreciated by all the people and functions who are responsible in putting the content on the web.

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact on of the l10n-drivers and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out (see list at the bottom)!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve by reaching out to any one of the l10n-drivers listed above.

Making a change with Pootle

Jeff Beatty

No responses yet

tl;dr: As of 1 September 2017, Mozilla’s Pootle instance (mozilla.locamotion.org) will be turned off. Between now and then, l10n-drivers will be assisting l10n communities using Pootle in moving all projects over to Pontoon. Pootle’s positive impact in Mozilla’s continued l10n evolution is undeniable and we thank them for all of their contributions throughout the years.

Continue reading …

The Ten Hands

Axel Hecht

1 response

Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely… One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders.

While most of mozilla gathered in San Francisco, a small group of ten hands gathered in a small village in Slovenia.

Matjaz hosted me, Stas, Adrian and Jarek, to work on Pontoon and other aspects of localization infrastructure at Mozilla. Jarek is a volunteer contributor extraordinaire to Pontoon, and we were finally able to have him join us for his first Mozilla gathering. Adrian is taking a break from his work on Socorro, and will take on work on Pontoon, at least for this quarter.

Adrian, Stas and I hadn’t really looked at the Pontoon code base, so this was a great opportunity to get us onboarded. We also had the chance to talk about some of the pros and cons of the basic data models powering Pontoon.

Jarek and Matjaz made great progress on getting errors and warnings from compare-locales hooked up to Pontoon. The PR already has 43 commits, and is shaping up nicely. It’s been good to see that we were able to use compare-locales as is, though we might want to optimize one API. I was able to help here a bit verbally myself. It’s interesting how efficient such 5 minutes can be, compared to our usual roundtrips of a day between work and not, and continents.

Adrian spent quite some time working on a setup of Pontoon on docker-compose. Having done that myself for the l10n automation, I was his tester here. The PR is now ready for review, which is also on me. Promise.

Stas started to experiment with graphene-django to expose a GraphQL API for Pontoon. That was surprisingly easy to get started. It was also surprisingly bad in performance. He’s written down his notes on the wiki, and we’ll reconvene soon on what the next steps should be. And yes, we abused the word “REST” in a lot of different ways during that week.

Stas and I made a lot of progress on support for Fluent in our core infrastructure, adding support for that in compare-locales and elmo. Stas finalized the support for Fluent in compare-locales. I added support for the diff view in elmo, which required a few updates to compare-locales, too. With the work on compare-locales 2.0, I also updated elmo to support both the legacy JSON output as well as the new JSON output from 2.0.

The days were just packed, as they say. We did go out and explore the area, mostly to get food. In a place where the cab driver has a day job, you have to. In a place where you can see three different countries from your porch, that also means you might go through passport control to go to dinner. Hello Croatia and croatian kunas, where dinner prices are not in euros. Last but not least a big Thank You to Eva and Robert from the Cuk Wine House for their hospitality.

The images are by Adrian Gaudebert and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

New L10n Report: July Edition

Delphine

No responses yet

Please note some of the information provided in this report may be subject to change as we are sometimes sharing information about projects that are still in early stages and are not final yet.

Welcome!

New localizers:

Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!

New community and locales added

  • azz (Sierra Puebla Nahuatl): it was onboarded in recent months and already made a lot of progress.
  • be (Belarusian): when we sadly had to drop Belarusian from our desktop and mobile builds due to inactivity, new contributors immediately contacted us to revive localization work. A big shout-out to this newly formed community!
  • Tg (Tajik): successfully localized their first project, Thimble!

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Big changes are coming to Firefox 57, with some of them sneaking up even in 56 (the version currently localized in Nightly, until August 7). The new feature with more significant impact for localization is the new Onboarding experience: it consists of both an Onboarding overlay (a tour displayed by clicking the fox icon in the New tab), and Onboarding notifications, displayed at the bottom of New tab.

If you haven’t seen them yet (we always make sure to tweet the link), we strongly suggest to read the latest news about Photon in the Photon Engineering Newsletter (here’s the latest #8).

On a side note, you should be using Nightly for your daily browsing, it’s exciting (changes every day!) and fundamental to ensure the quality of your localization.

There is a bug on file to stop localizing about:networking, given how small the target is (users debugging network issues) and how obscure some of these strings are.

A final reminder: The deadline to update Firefox Beta is July 25. Remember that Firefox Beta should mainly be used to fix small issues, since new translations added directly to Beta need to be manually added to the Nightly project in your localization tools.

What’s new or coming up in Test Pilot

The new set of experiments, originally planned for July 5, has been moved to July 25. Make also sure to read this mail on dev-l10n if you have issues testing the website on the dev server.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

  • Mobile (both Android and iOS projects) is going to align with the visual changes coming up on desktop by getting a revamped UI thanks to Photon. Check it out!
    • Firefox for Android Photon meta-bug.
    • Please note that due to the current focus on desktop with Firefox 57, Firefox for Android work is slower than usual. Expect to see more and more Photon updates on Nightly builds though as time passes by.
  • We recently launched Focus for Android v1 with 52 languages! Have you tried it out yet? Reviews speak for themselves. Expect a new release soon, and with that, more locales (and of course, more features and improvements to the app)!
  • Mobile experiments are on the rise. The success of Focus is paving the way to many other great mobile projects. Stay tuned on our mailing list because there just may be cool stuff arriving very soon!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

  • With the new look and feel, a new set of Firefox pages and unified footer were released for l10n. Make sure to localize firefox/shared.lang before localizing the new pages. Try to complete these new pages before deadline or the pages will redirect to English on August 15
  • Monthly snippets have expanded to more locales. Last month, we launched the first set in RTL locales: ar, fa, he, and ur. The team is considering creating regional specific snippets.
  • A set of Internet Health pages were launched. Some recent updates were made to fit the new look and layout. Many communities have participated in localizing some or all pages.
  • The newly updated Community Participation Guideline is now localized in six languages: de, es, fr, hi-IN, pt-BR, and zh-TW. Thanks to the impacted communities for reviewing the document before publishing.
  • Expect more updates of existing pages in the coming months so the look and feel are consistent between pages.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

  • Thimble, the educational code editor, got a makeover and new useful features, that all got localized in more than 20 locales.
  • The fundraising campaign will start ramping up earlier than November this year, so it’s a great idea to make sure the project is up-to-date for your locale, if it isn’t already.
  • The EU Copyright campaign is in slow mode over the summer while MEPs are on holiday, but we will rock again full speed in September before committees are voting
  • We will launch an Internet of Things survey over the summer to get a better understanding of what people know about IoT.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

Events

  • Next l10n workshop will be in Asuncion, Paraguay (August)
  • Berlin l10n workshop is coming up in September!
  • Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Reach out to any l10n-driver and we’ll include that (see links to emails at the bottom of this report)

Opportunities

Accomplishments

Some numbers

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

  • Shout-out to all Mozilla RTL communities who have been doing a great job at filing and fixing bugs on mobile – as well as providing much needed feedback and insights during these past few months! Tomer, Reza, ItielMaN, Umer, Amir, Manel, Yaron, Abdelrahman, Yaseen – just to name a few. Thank you!
  • Thanks to Jean-Bernard and Adam for jumping in to translate the new Firefox pages in French.
  • Thanks to Nihad of Bosnian community for leading the effort in localizing the mozilla.org site that is now on production.
  • A big thank you to Duy Thanh for his effort in rebuilding the Vietnamese community and his ongoing localization contribution.
  • kab (Kabyle) community started a while back, their engagement is impressive in all products and projects.

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact on of the l10n-drivers and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out (see list at the bottom)!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve by reaching out to any one of the l10n-drivers listed above.

Localization at Mozilla SF All Hands

Jeff Beatty

No responses yet

Hello from sunny Northern California!

This week was Mozilla’s bi-annual All Hands, a gathering that brings Mozilla employees and community together for a week to hack on key Mozilla objectives. This All Hands, the Firefox team (which l10n is a part of) was in “all hands on deck” mode to make significant progress on the upcoming Firefox 57 launch. That being the case it was a bit different and more unstructured than previous All Hands.

Fun concept art by Sean Martell depicting Mozilla building new Firefox in comic book style.

L10n-drivers this week focused on a number of improvements to the localizer experience. Pontoon saw more work dedicated to QA checks, incorporating elements of compare-locales within the platform itself. We made significant progress toward landing l20n in Firefox desktop, enabling multi-locale Firefox desktop builds, and we creating l10n documentation for Pontoon and other elements of the l10n process. We also performed an initial terminology extraction from mozilla.org in order to create a Mozilla-specific termbase. Finally, we made the next version of the “Promote Firefox in your language” community marketing guide (which will be available on GitHub soon for the final feedback round) and the next version of the monthly Mozilla l10n report.

We’re also happy to announce two new communication channels for the global localization community: Facebook and Telegram. Over the years we’ve learned that different communities around the world need different ways to connect online than the more traditional means: mailing lists and IRC. Our Facebook group and Telegram channel will not replace mailing lists and IRC, but will supplement those in the hopes of increasing our reach to all l10n communities world wide and making it easier to promote the community’s contributions to localization. To avoid spammers, we moderate both of these channels, so if you’d like to join either, please reach out to your l10n community leaders (most of them are in one or both of these channels).

We’re all very excited for new Firefox to reach users on localized builds with Firefox 57. If you’re not already using Nightly in your language, please download and help us improve localization coverage of Firefox in your language. Firefox 57 will have some very exciting new features that non-English speakers will absolutely want in their language. We’ll increase messaging about exciting things in Firefox 57 throughout the next couple of months to keep you informed and allow you to start sharing them with your friends and family.

Paris Localization Workshop

Delphine

1 response

From May 6th-7th, 42 participants (coincidence? I think not) gathered in the beautiful city of Paris for another successful edition of our l10n workshops. This was one of our larger scale events with a total of twelve localization communities from four continents: Acholi, Fulah, Songhay, Xhosa, Wolof, Azerbaijani, Turkish, Uzbek, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Urdu. What a diverse group! This was in fact the broadest geographical coverage in a single l10n event.

Marcia Knous and Pascal Chevrel, both from the Release Management team and working on Firefox Nightly, joined us and held a Nightly workshop on the side with members from the French community – as well as some joint sessions around Project Dawn and Nightly testing updates, that were of equal interest for both our groups present (i.e., L10n and Nightly communities).

Some may have noticed that, this year, our workshops have slowly started to evolve with each iteration. For example, although spectrograms have been a big part of our past workshops and have proved to be very useful, we decided not to do them this time around. With time, we’ve realized they are unfortunately a time constraint, and that we needed to shift our focus a bit (after all, we had been doing these for the past 2 years).

Instead, l10n-drivers present held a Q&A session – which resembled the Mozilla fireside chats in a way. Overall this proved to be very valuable as it lets localizers really get clarifications and dive deeper into whichever topic they are interested in. In fact, we had l10n-drivers from across the board present, which helped this session be broad enough, and technical enough, to interest everyone present.

(picture by Emin Mastizada)

To give an idea, the l10n-drivers at the event were:

Delphine Lebédel: L10n Firefox mobile project manager

Peiying Mo: L10n mozilla.org project manager

Théo Chevalier: Mozilla Foundation l10n project manager

Axel Hecht: L10n tech lead

Francesco Lodolo: L10n Firefox desktop project manager

Drivers also gave short updates on current projects’ status and general Mozilla plans and goals for the year.

(Picture by Christophe Villeneuve)

We also made room for community presentations this time around. Any community who wanted to present their work was welcome to do so. One of these was a presentation about RTL (right-to-left) on mobile. It was great to see the Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu communities spontaneously pair up and start collaborating not only for this presentation, but during the workshop as a whole.

Ibrahima from the Fulah localization team also gave a presentation on Unicode and UTF-8 from the perspective of his own community, sharing insights and lessons learned from years of diving into the topic.

Communities spent most of the rest of their time on accomplishing the goals they had set themselves for the weekend (goals and general agenda details here).

Thanks to Flore’s (a long time Mozilla contributor) spontaneous initiative, there was even a cultural activity organized, which included walking to the Trocadéro and seeing the beautiful Tour Eiffel – a must when you are in Paris. Led by Flore, participants bravely faced the parisian rain in order to get a breath of fresh air.

Although logistics were somewhat trickier to plan for such a large and diverse group, it was an incredible experience that allowed communities from completely different backgrounds to share insights and tips amongst each other – which, as always, was a beautiful and humbling moment to witness.

Thanks to the community feedback that we always gather from our final survey, we are able to learn and grow – making each edition an improvement over the previous ones, and building upon each event we hold. One take-away from this (and past) event(s) is that we are currently looking into how other organizations make sure that their events are as “food-friendly” – and accessible – to as many people as possible.

We are also tweaking up our format a bit with each workshop we do this year. We have realized that we need change, and that we can improve things much more quickly by being flexible and adapting with each workshop we hold. Communities are different, issues are different, cultures are different. One format does not fit them all! So we are eager to continue exploring this year and reporting back what we have found. And then building upon the lessons we learn with each new event. Maybe tweaking things up to be more like a localization unconference for the next iteration is going to be our next playground…

In any case, it seems to become clearer each time we organize one of these events that community needs diversity, and needs more meet-ups that let them mingle with a larger crowd. Two days may not be enough, especially given we are flying people from so far away. We’ve learned from our surveys that community misses the larger Mozcamp and MozSummit formats: they need to exchange more with like-minded people, from a much more diverse group, in order to strive and progress effectively. Exploring the idea of global localization workshops, with maybe other l10n communities from other open source projects, is one idea we are also currently playing with.

As usual, thoughts and feedback on improvements are always welcome. We want to hear from you! Always feel free to pitch any ideas by reaching out to anyone in our team.

Next up… Paraguay in August! Stay tuned 🙂

(Picture by Christophe Villeneuve)

(Picture by Christophe Villeneuve)

(Picture by Christophe Villeneuve)