L10n report: March edition

Delphine

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New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Schedule and important dates

Firefox 66 has been released on March 19, which means:

  • Firefox 68 is currently in Nightly.
  • Firefox 67 is in Beta.

The deadline to ship updates for Beta will be on April 30. Also don’t forget that Firefox 68 is going to be the next ESR version: ideally you should be localizing it early in Nightly, in order to have a good amount of time for testing before it reaches the release channel.

Removing unmaintained locales

This is not an action that we take lightly, because it’s demoralizing for the Community and potentially confusing for users, but in some cases we have to remove locales from Firefox builds. As outlined in the document, we try our best to revive the localization effort, and only act when it’s clear that we can’t solve the problem in other ways.

In Firefox 68 we’re going to remove the following locales: Assamese (as), South-African English (en-ZA), Maithili (mai), Malayalam (ml), Odia (or).

We’re also working with the Bengali community to unify two locales – Bengali India (bn-IN) and Bengali Banglashed (bn-BD) – under a single locale (bn), to optimize the Community resources we have.

Firefox Monitor

The add-on for Firefox Monitor is now localized as part of the main Firefox projects. If you want to test it:

  • Open about:config and create a new boolean setting, extensions.fxmonitor.enabled, and set it to true.
  • Navigate to a breached site. You can pick a website from this list, just make sure that the “AddedDate” is within the last 12 months.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Just like for Firefox Desktop, the deadline to ship updates for Fennec Beta will be on April 30. Read the previous section of this report for more details surrounding that.

A notable Android update this month (that we’ve just announced on the dev-l10n mailing list – please consider following if it’s not yet the case) is that we’ve exposed on Pontoon the new Android-Components strings as part of the new Android-l10n project, to a small subset of locales.

Fenix browser strings are right around the corner as well, and will be exposed very soon in that same project, so stay tuned. Read up here for more details on all this.

On Firefox iOS side, we’re still working hard on shipping the upcoming version, which will be v16. Deadline for localization was today (March 21st), and with this new version we are adding one new locale: Vietnamese! Congrats to the team for shipping their first localized version of Firefox iOS!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

AMO and Facebook Container extension

Mozilla is partnering with the European Union to promote its Facebook Container extension in advance of the upcoming EU elections. We have translated the listing for the extension on addons.mozilla.org into 24 languages primarily used within the EU, and we could use your help localizing the user interface for addons.mozilla.org so people can have a more complete experience when downloading the extension. AMO frontend and server are two huge projects. If your locale has a lot to catch up, you can focus on these top priority strings the team has identified (note there are two tabs). You can search for them in the AMO Frontend project in Pontoon.

In order to promote the extension in 24 languages, we need to enable AMO server and AMO Frontend in all the languages, including Maltese, of which we don’t have a community. We also added a few languages out of product requirement without communities’ agreement.  These languages are on the “read-only” locale list. They are Croatian, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian for AMO Frontend, and Estonian and Latvian for AMO Server. If any of these communities are interested in localizing at least the high priority strings, please email the l10n-drivers so we can change the language setting.

Mozilla.org

There are a few updates coming soon. To prioritize, make sure to focus on shared files first (main.lang, download_button.lang), then the rest by star priority rating, or by deadline if applicable. You may see a few of the same strings appearing in several files. We usually leverage existing translations into a brand new file, but less so for updated file. In the latter case, please rely on Pontoon’s `Machinery` feature to leverage from your previous work.

Common Voice

Many new contributors joined the Mozilla localization communities through this project and are only interested in this project. Though there is an existing community that has been localizing other projects, the new contributors are new to localization, to Pontoon, to Mozilla localization process. They need your help with onboarding. Many have contributed to the project and are waiting for constructive feedback. Locale managers, please check the Common Voice project to see if there are strings waiting to be reviewed in your locale. Try to arrange resources to provide feedback in a timely manner. Based on the quality of the new contributors’ work and their interest, you can grant them broader permission at project level.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

A very quick update on the misinformation campaign — the scorecard mentioned last month won’t be released, due to external changes. The good news is that a lot of the work done by the team is being reused and multiple campaigns will be launched instead. Details are evolving quickly, so there’s not much to share yet. We will keep you posted!

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Translate.Next. Soon we’ll begin testing of the rewritten translation interface of Pontoon. The look & feel will largely remain the same, but the codebase will be completely different, allowing us to fulfill user requests in a more timely manner. Stay tuned for more updates in the usual l10n channels!

Improving experience for 3rd party installations. While used internally at Mozilla, Pontoon is a general purpose TMS with good support for popular localization file formats, ready to localize a variety of open source projects, apps or websites. Vishal started improving experience for 3rd party deployments by making Pontoon homepage customizable instead of hardcoding the Mozilla-specific content used on pontoon.mozilla.org. The path to setting up a first project for localization is now also more obvious.

 

Under the hood changes. Thanks to Jotes and Aniruddha, our Python test coverage has  improved. On top of that, Jotes started making first steps towards migrating our codebase to Python3.

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 report: February edition

Peiying Mo

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Welcome!

New localizers

The following contributors came to us through the Common Voice project.

  • Paramashivam of Tamil, also very active on the Firefox project
  • Roi of Hebrew on a variety of projects
  • Théo of Kinyarwanda has made a lot of progress in a short period of time!
  • Danielius of Lithuanian joins us last week
  • Nienke of Frisian leading a group of colleagues focuses their effort on sentence collection at the moment

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

New community/locales added

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

This week we’re going to reach an important milestone for Fluent in Firefox, having more Fluent strings than DTDs in mozilla-central (currently 2466 vs 2489). There are already 5 patches in review to migrate more elements to Fluent, thanks to the work of the MSU Capstone students: Page Info window, contextual menu for tabs, print dialogs, about:privatebrowsing, Password Manager dialog.

Here are a few important dates for the current release cycles:

  • Firefox 67 is in Nightly, and will move to Beta on March 18.
  • Firefox 66 is in Beta. The deadline for localization is March 5.
  • Firefox 66 will be released on March 19.

In terms of content, the priority currently remains on the profile-per-install feature already mentioned in the previous l10n report, and on the dev-l10n mailing list.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

This has been a rather quiet month in regards to mobile localization updates.

Teams are mostly heads-down working on kicking off the Fenix browser project.

In the meantime, other mobile apps are following their usual timelines and schedule –  so there is nothing much to call out this month.

Stay tuned for the next report, as we’ll have a few things in the pipeline to call out for sure!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org

We’ve added a new page ahead of the Firefox 66 release. Check in Pontoon and look for firefox/whatsnew_66.lang. To be part of the release, make sure to complete it by March 6. The demo URL is not ready at the moment. We will update you as soon as it becomes available.

A small but an important update is in the privacy/index.lang file. The change is urgent so please localize the string as soon as possible.

Have you taken a look of the newly designed navigation bar? It was recently rolled out with quite a bit of content to localize. Make it a high priority if it is not localized yet.

Common Voice

The team is super excited to launch the sentence collection tool! Though in Beta, it is fully functional. Moving forward, the site will be the place to submit, review and validate sentences in a more organized way and it is a lot easier for everyone, especially those who are not technical. Be sure to read the How To guide to make full use of the features. We want to thank all the key contributors who helped make the tool a reality.

Legal documents

Common Voice: The Privacy Notice and the Legal Terms have been updated in English. Only a select few languages are updated accordingly. These are the languages that have reached the threshold of collecting a minimum of 5000 sentences. If your community has  the bandwidth, feel free to review and make necessary suggestions. All these suggestions are subject to peer review before the corrections are published. These are the languages that are recently updated: Breton, Catalan, Chuvash, Dutch, Esperanto, German, French, Hakha Chin, Irish, Italian, Kabyle, Kyrgyz, Slovenian, Tatar, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Welsh.

Firefox Lite: We’ve added Traditional Chinese and Vietnamese to the Privacy Notice. Feel free to review the document and make necessary changes.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

The foundation’s impact goal — Better machine decision making — now has its public wiki page with a lot of resources explaining the Foundation’s goals and activities for 2019 and beyond. If you want to learn more about what MoFo is up to, this is a great way to dive in!

Fundraising

The fundraising team is starting to plan some mini-campaigns linked to specific events (the Internet Health Report publication, Fellowships, MozFest, and the traditional end-of-year fundraising) with the goal of explaining that Mozilla does much more than a browser and providing potential donors with a better understanding of the Foundation’s work.
We mentioned the new receipts in the previous L10N Report, those are still coming, they just needed further adjustments and another round of review from the Legal team. The team wants to get this right to have future-proof donation receipts.

Advocacy

The EU misinformation campaign has started! The survey mentioned last month went out, and on February 11th, the team sent an open letter to Facebook (simultaneously launched in English, French & German) asking for more transparency on political ads ahead of the EU elections. This letter was also signed by 38 partners including Access Now, Greenpeace and Reporters Without Borders.

Facebook responded in just a few hours, preventing us from publishing the open letter in more languages, but thanks to the dedication of localizers, the simultaneous launch in multiple languages has more than doubled the public engagement: while the team has sent more emails in English, engagement in the campaign in terms of clicks, open letter signatures and post-signing donations came primarily from localized emails in French and German! Mozilla has since responded to the announcement.

Next steps will be an opportunity to involve even more locales and will include launching a scorecard and an election bundle. Rooted in the principles outlined in the European Commission’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, the scorecard will compare how major social platforms are performing as they take steps to combat dis/misinformation.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

There have been some important changes in Mozilla staff since the last report.

We need your help to review the following articles:

  • In all the locales for Firefox 65 articles:

Want to follow the Firefox 66 modified articles to be published in the SUMO Discourse in the coming weeks?  Please subscribe to the tag.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

At the end of last year we held a community design sprint with aim of improving the review process in Pontoon. The proposed changes were mostly focused around one of the top requested features of Pontoon – translation comments.

The following product specification is a result of the design sprint. It defines the problem we’re solving, lists measurable goals we’d like to achieve, outlines the proposed solution and provides a rough timeline.

It’s a short, 7 minute read. Please have a look at it, or at least skim through the screenshot tour. As you’ll see, changes to the translate view are pretty substantial, so we’d like to hear your opinion. Either on Discourse or in the spec.

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.

A New Year with New Goals for Mozilla Localization

Jeff Beatty

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We had a really ambitious and busy year in 2018! Thanks to the help of the global localization community as well as a number of cross-functional Mozilla staff, we were able to focus our efforts on improving the foundations of our localization program. These are some highlights of what we accomplished in 2018:

  • Fluent syntax stability.
  • New design for review process in Pontoon.
  • Continuous localization for Firefox desktop.
  • arewefluentyet.com
  • Formation of Mozilla Terminology Working Group for defining en-US source terms.
  • 8 community-organized workshops around the world.
  • Firefox Lite localization.
  • Research and recommendations for future international brand management.
  • Begun rewrite of Pontoon’s Translate view to React.
  • Clearly defined l10n community roles and their responsibilities.

Rather than plan out our goals for the full year in 2019, we’ve been encouraged to take it a quarter at a time. That being said, there are a number of interesting themes that will pop up in 2019 as well as the continuation of work from 2018:

Standardize & Scale

There are still areas within our tool-chain as well as our processes that make it hard to scale localization to all of Mozilla. Over the course of 2018 we saw more and more l10n requests from internal teams that required customized processes. The good news here is that the organization as a whole wants to localize more and more content (that hasn’t been true in the past)!

While we’ve seen success in standardizing the processes for localizing product user interfaces, we’ve struggled to rein in the customizations for other types of content. In 2019, we’ll focus a lot of our energy on bringing more stability and consistency to localizers by standardizing localization processes according to specific content types. Once standardized, we’ll be able to scale to meet the the needs of these internal teams while keeping the amount of new content to translate in consistent volumes.

Mobilize South East Asian Locales

One of the primary focus areas for all of Mozilla this year is South East Asian markets. The Emerging Markets team in Taipei is focused on creating products for those markets that meet the needs of users there, building on the success of Screenshots Go and Firefox Lite. This year we’ll see more products coming to these markets and it will be more important than ever for us to know how to mobilize l10n communities in those regions in order to localize these exciting, new products.

New Technologies

Early this year we plan to hit a major milestone: Fluent 1.0! This is the culmination of over a decade’s worth of work and we couldn’t be more proud of this accomplishment. Fluent will continue to be implemented in Firefox as well as other Mozilla projects throughout 2019. We’re planning a roadmap for an ecosystem of tooling to support Fluent 1.0 as well as exploring how to build a thriving Fluent community.

Pontoon’s Translate view rewrite to React will be complete and we’ll be implementing features for a newly redesigned review process. Internationalizing the Pontoon Translate UI will be a priority, as well as addressing some long-requested feature updates, like terminology support as well as improved community and user profile metrics.

Train the Trainers

In 2018 we published clear descriptions of the responsibilities and expectations of localizers in specific community roles. These roles are mirror images of Pontoon roles, as Pontoon is the central hub for localization at Mozilla. In 2019, we plan to organize a handful of workshops in the latter half of the year to train Managers on how to be effective leaders in their communities and reliable extensions of the l10n-drivers team. We would like to record at least one of these and make the workshop training available to everyone through the localizer documentation (or some other accessible place).

We aim to report on the progress of these themes throughout the year in quarterly reports. In each report, we’ll share the outcomes of the objectives of one quarter and describe the objectives for the next quarter. In Q1 of 2019 (January – March), the l10n-drivers will:

  • Announce release of Fluent 1.0 to the world
  • Standardize vendor localization process under separate, self-service tool-chain for vendor-sourced content types.
  • Standardize the way Android products are bootstrapped and localized
  • Know how to effectively mobilize South/East Asian communities
  • Transition mozilla.org away from .lang-based l10n infrastructure.
  • Port Pontoon’s translate view to React and internationalize it.

As always, if you have questions about any of these objectives or themes for 2019, please reach out to an l10n-driver, we’d be very happy to chat.

L10n report: January edition

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

No responses 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

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

The localization cycle for Firefox 66 in Nightly is approaching its end, and Tuesday (Jan 15) was the last day to get changes into Firefox 65 before it moves to release (Jan 29). These are the key dates for the next cycle:

  • January 28: Nightly will be bumped to version 67.
  • February 26: deadline to ship updates to Beta (Firefox 66).

As of January, localization of the Pocket add-on has moved back into the Firefox main project. That’s a positive change for localization, since it gives us a clearer schedule for updates, while before they were complex and sparse. All existing translations from the stand-alone process were imported into Mercurial repositories (and Pontoon).

In terms of prioritization, there are a couple of features to keep an eye on:

  • Profile per installation: with Firefox 67, Firefox will begin using a dedicated profile for each Firefox version (including Nightly, Beta, Developer Edition, and ESR). This will make Firefox more stable when switching between versions on the same computer and will also allow you to run different Firefox installations at the same time. This introduces a set of dialogs and web pages to warn the user about the change, and explain how to sync data between profiles. Unlike other features, this targets all versions, but Nightly users in particular, since they are more likely to have multiple profiles according to Telemetry data. That’s a good reason to prioritize these strings.
  • Security error pages: nothing is more frustrating than being unable to reach a website because of certificate issues. There are a lot of experiments happening around these pages and the associated user experience, both in Beta and Release, so it’s important to prioritize translations for these strings (they’re typically in netError.dtd).

Continue reading …

L10n report: December edition

Jeff Beatty

No responses yet

Hi everyone and welcome to the December 2018 Mozilla l10n report!

Before getting into the individual updates, I wanted to call out that the Mozilla All Hands was held last week in Orlando, FL. For our part, we made progress on conversations with different marketing groups, mozilla.org engineers, and Open Innovation about standardizing the l10n process for each of their types of content requiring translation. We also had a few cross-organization discussions about Fluent in Firefox and the Multilingual Firefox project. Plans for 2019, on an organization level, are still being finalized and are too early to share at the moment, but we look forward to opportunities to share those plans once they’re ready.

Thank you for a full year of donating your time to localize Mozilla projects. We’re incredibly grateful to get to work with you and look forward to accomplishing more together next year!

Welcome!

New localizers

  • Arabic: Tony Issa joined us through the Common Voice project.

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

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Firefox 64 has been officially released on December 11. As a localizer, it’s important to  remember that there’s a strict deadline to ship updates in the next official version of Firefox, and that’s about 2 weeks before the release date (Nov 27 for Firefox 64). The deadline to ship updates to translations in Firefox 65 will be January 15.

In general, the best approach is to localize Nightly periodically, and use Nightly in your daily browsing to test your work (it’s updated twice a day). If you can’t, then targeting the very beginning of the beta cycle is a good alternative, to leave a few weeks for testing on Beta, and get as many eyes as possible on the localized version.

As for Firefox 65 and 66, while the migration to Fluent proceeds, the main focus – and source of strings – still remains testing and improving tracking protection features and security error pages.

Firefox 65 will include an exciting and brand new feature for multilingual users, but we’ll talk about it in a dedicated blog post with all the details.

Continue reading …

Multilingual Gecko Status Update 2018.2

zbraniecki

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Welcome to the third edition of Multilingual Gecko Status Update!

In the previous update we covered the work which landed in Firefox 59 and Firefox 60.

At the time, we’ve been finalizing the platform work to support Fluent localization system, and we were in the middle of migration of the first Firefox UI component – Preferences – to it.

Today, we’ll pick up right where we left off!

Firefox 61 (June)

Firefox 61 fits into the trend of things calming down in Intl – and it’s a great news! It means that we are reaching platform maturity after all the groundbreaking refactors in 2017, and we all can focus on the work on top of the modules, rather than playing whack-a-mole fixing bugs and adding missing features.

The biggest platform change is really just an update to ICU 61 which Andre landed in March and my work on adding mozIntl.RelativeTimeFormat and mozIntl.getLocaleDisplayNames.

The former gave us a stable unified API for presenting relative time (such as “In 5 minutes” or “10 days ago”) while the latter unified how we present language, region and combinations of those in our user interface based on the Unicode CLDR representation (example: “English (United States)”).

As we explained in my earliest posts, one of the things we’re particularly proud of is that we go the extra mile to use every such opportunity to not only fix the immediate Firefox UI need, but also push such proposals for standardization and in result make the Web Platform more complete.

In this case, Intl.RelativeTimeFormat has been proposed and thanks to amazing work by Daniel Ehrenberg is now in Stage 3 and soon will be exposed to all web developers in all browsers! Intl.getLocaleDisplayNames is less mature but the work on it just picked up.

Firefox migration to Fluent reached its next milestone moving from just a couple messages to over 100 Fluent messages in Firefox!

Notable changes [intl module]:

Firefox 62 (September)

Another calm cycle! The biggest feature was the introduction of the pseudolocalization in Firefox which I blogged about, and landing of the developer documentation.

The documentation has been insanely useful in distributing knowledge and helping engineers feel more comfortable working with the new stack, and we’re very happy we reached a stage where landing a documentation is the big news 🙂

In the Fluent land we spent the March-May timeframe moving from a 100 messages to 500 Fluent messages in Firefox!

Notable changes [intl module]:

Firefox 63 (October)

This cycle was quite similar to the previous one, with a bulk of work going into regular maintenance and cleanups.

For my work, the trend is to start integrating Fluent deeper into Gecko with more work around L10nRegistry v1 limitations and getting deeper DOM integration to improve XUL performance.

In this cycle he landed a XPCOM mozIDOMLocalization API which allows us to call Fluent from C++ and was required for a bigger change that we landed in Firefox 64.

One new theme is Kris Maglione who started working on reducing the performance and memory overhead coming from the old StringBundle API (used for .properties). With all the new work centralized around Fluent, but with a large portion of our strings still using StringBundle, it becomes a great target for optimizations by cutting out everything we don’t use and now we know – we never will.

Notable changes [intl module]:

Firefox 64 (December)

This release, is still getting stabilized and will get released in December, but the work cycle on it happened between September and October, so we can already provide you an account of that work!

Besides of a regular stack of cleanups coming from Henri and me, we’ve seen Ehsan Akhgari taking over from Kris to remove more lines of unused code.

The really big change was the introduction of DocumentL10n API which is a C++ API with its own WebIDL tightly integrated into the very core of DOM module in Gecko – nsIDocument.

Before that Fluent lived in Gecko in some form of a glorified javascript library. While it is Fluent’s goal to target the web platform, Firefox UI is inherently different from the web content and benefits from better integration between the DOM and its localization component.

This change allowed us to better integrate localization into the document’s life cycle, but what’s even more important, it allowed us to expose Fluent to documents that usually do not have special privileges and could not access Fluent before.

As for migration, we moved along nicely bumping from 500 to around 800 messages thanks to hard work of a number of students mentored by Jared Wein and Gijs Kruitbosch. The students picked up work on the migration as their Capstone project.

Notable changes [intl module]:

Summary

2018 has been much “easier” for the intl module than 2017 was. It’s great to see the how all pieces fit together and for me personally, it enabled me to focus on getting Fluent better integrated into Gecko.

There’s still a lot of work but it now is fully focused on Fluent and localization, while our intl module as a whole goes through a more well earned peaceful period.

Between now and the next status update, we hope to publish a summary post about the last two years of work. Stay tuned!

L10n Report: November 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.

Hello everyone,

We would like to thank you for reading the l10n reports and keeping updated on what’s happening in the Mozilla l10n community. And we would also like to make it even better! If you have a few minutes before or after reading this month’s report, could you please take this short, anonymous survey?

Yes, I take the survey

Thank you, and enjoy this new report!

Welcome!

New localizers

Derek started contributing to Navajo locale for Focus Android project. Welcome Derek!

Almar and Valdimar just recently joined a community workshop in Iceland, and immediately started contributing to Icelandic locale. Welcome to you both, we are glad to have you on board!

Lobsang is not only a new contributor, he also kicked off localization for Tibetan locale! Focus for Android will be the first browser ever localized in Tibetan 🙂 Congrats and welcome!

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

New community/locales added

Navajo was just recently added to Pontoon.

Tibetan was also added to our localization effort.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Firefox 63 is currently available in release, while 64 is in beta, and 65 in Nightly. The last day available to ship updates for beta will be November 27.

Most of the strings landed towards the end of the Nightly cycle are still related to Privacy (Content Blocking, Trackers, etc.) and Security (certificate error pages), but there’s a also a new about:performance page, using Fluent for localization.

Talking about Fluent, as anticipated in the September edition of this report, expect a lot of strings moving to FTL files in the coming weeks. You can also visit arewefluentyet.com to visualize the work done around this area, and get an idea of how many strings are left.

A new project, strictly connected to Firefox, is also available in Pontoon for localization: Firefox Monitor. There are 2 distinct parts:

  • An add-on, which displays a notification (doorhanger) when you visit a website with known data breaches.
  • The actual website, monitor.firefox.com, and the text used to send emails to users.

Both projects are scheduled for launch in the first half of November.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

With version 63 slowly rolling out to users in the coming week, you will be now able to use Firefox for Android in English for Canada (en-CA) and Ligurian (lij) on the release version! Congratulations to those teams for completing and shipping this work.

We’ve also shipped Firefox for iOS v14 a few days ago, and the main new features are:

  • Siri shortcuts
  • Dark Theme improvements
  • Performance Improvements
  • Make Clear Private Data settings panel more granular

A new experiment just came out in Indonesia, and you can try it out too: ScreenshotGO. This project is shipping on Google Play in Indonesia only at the time, but you can give it a try by installing it from its GitHub project page. The main idea is to provide better screenshot management on Android devices. Users can add a “Go” button their device to speed up the taking of screenshots.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

Fundraising

The October fundraiser went out over the last few days and is doing pretty great so far, thanks a lot to everyone who contributed! It’s definitely helping the Foundation raise money to fund next year’s programs.

Fundraising email schedule for November and December is shaping up, starting on Giving Tuesday:

Email #1 Giving Tuesday (11/27)
Email #2 12/03
Email #3 12/17
Email #4 12/27
Email #5 – Mitchell message 12/31

It’s likely we will get help from a vendor for some of those emails, especially if the copy gets approved right before the holidays. Of course we will keep you updated.

Advocacy

The Advocacy team is working on test campaigns around misinformation and plan to launch one or two of them early this month. The campaigns can potentially be launched globally, but will always keep a focus on Europe. Markets and locales will heavily depend from the campaign targets.

The campaigns will have 3 main goals:

  • To grow public support and demand for policymakers to tackle misinformation with healthy internet policies.
  • To provide policymakers with a network of accessible experts and reliable information to help shape healthy internet policies.
  • To engage corporations and build industry allies to tackle this issue.

What’s new or coming up in Support

– New and updated Firefox 63 content awaits, giving your talent another chance to shine. Click the links below, see if your locale is waiting for your involvement and go for it!

– If you need an introduction or refresher on how localizing works for support.mozilla.org, please take a look at our step-by-step explanation (with videos).

– Warm thanks to the Bengali community for organizing a fun and exciting event that included localizing Support content.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

– Errors & Warnings. We launched support for Errors & Warnings in Pontoon, which allow you to easily identify and fix translations breaking Firefox builds or exceeding the length limit on Mozilla.org. Note that Warnings, unlike Errors, mean that we’re not completely sure that the string contains critical issues, so it might be OK to just leave them unchanged. For more details, check out the documentation or read more about Errors & Warnings and a handful of other novelties in Pontoon.

– Changing Machine Translation provider. We switched to Google Cloud Translation API as our machine translation provider. Previously, we used a free plan of Microsoft Translator Text API, which only worked with the old version of the API. That version is now being deprecated and lately started behaving unreliably, often not returning any results. One of the benefits of using Google Translate is that the number of Mozilla locales with machine translation support more than doubled (from 48 to 103).

Events

  • A workshop organized by the Mozilla Nativo community is about to kick-off in a few weeks in Oaxaca, from Nov 10-11.
  • Another community workshop is right around the corner: the South East Asia event will take place in Hanoi from Nov 17-18.
  • 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)

 

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

Shout-out to Stoyan (one of our Bulgarian localizers) for working on a patch that adds several Firefox add-ons to help localizers test all permission strings. Update includes all recent webext permissions. Check it out here!

 

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.

Bringing critical information closer to localizers

Matjaž Horvat

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One of the missions of Pontoon since its inception has been to host critical information needed for localization under one roof. Over the course of the last few months several pieces of that puzzle have been solved.

Translation errors and warnings

Until recently, a vital piece of information was missing from Pontoon dashboards, namely translation errors and warnings. Localizers had to go hunt them on the standalone product dashboard, where they appeared 20-30 minutes after being submitted in Pontoon. If they wanted to fix an error, they had to go back to Pontoon, submit a (hopefully) legit translation, and wait another 20-30 minutes to see product dashboard go green.

As you can imagine, very few localizers actually did that. So in practice it was mostly project managers that were looking for errors, submitting suggestions with fixes and pinging localizers to approve them.

The first step towards bringing errors and warnings closer to localizers’ attention was made back in May when we started using compare-locales checks in Pontoon. These checks are split into two groups. The first consists of checks that need to be passed by translations landing in localized products (e.g. Firefox builds). Pontoon prevents translations failing those checks from even being saved. The second group contains more loose checks, which aren’t required in the build process and can be bypassed in Pontoon.

Since May we extended compare-locales support from the basic translation workbench to all places where translations can enter Pontoon, including batch actions, file upload, and import from VCS. Finally, we performed checks on all translations previously stored in Pontoon.

Now that we had the data about failing checks, we started integrating them into the localizers’ workflow, so they could be fixed easily. We introduced two new translation statuses: Errors for translations failing checks from the stricter group, and Warnings for translations failing checks that can be bypassed.

Next, we started calculating Errors & Warnings counts and revealing them on dashboards. Shortly after corresponding filters have been implemented for quick access to strings with failing checks.

Errors (red) and warnings (orange) are designated with their respective colors in the string list. The list of failing checks appears in the editor upon openning the string.

Finally, the effort spanning multiple quarters started paying off. In the 7 days since the (silent) launch, the number of errors across all localizations went down by 42%. The number of warnings (which include false positives) decreased by 10%.

A huge shout-out to jotes, the powerhouse behind landing translation errors and warnings in Pontoon! As part of this effort he not only fixed 8 bugs with a total of 3,000 lines worth of changesets, but also designed the development process we used.

Including all localizations

Another important piece of information that made it to Pontoon recently are localizations that don’t take place in Pontoon. We introduced the ability to enable such localizations in read-only mode, so project managers can now access full project stats in dashboards and the API. Additionally, all Mozilla translations are now accessible in the Locales tab, and Translation Memory of teams that localize some of their projects outside Pontoon now also includes those.

Inversely, we removed system projects (Tutorial and Pontoon Intro) from dashboards, which means they now contain not only all, but also only the relevant stats.

Resource deadlines and priorities

The most critical piece of information coming from the tags feature is resource priority. It used to be pretty hard to discover, because it was only available in the Tags tab, rarely used by localizers. Back in July we fixed that by exposing resource priority in the Resources tab of the Localization dashboard. Similarly we also added a resource deadline column.

As a consequnce of these two changes localizers can now see resource priorities and deadlines without leaving Pontoon for the standalone web dashboard.

The road ahead

We hope these changes will increase efficiency of the Mozilla localization community and we’re happy to see numbers already started confirming that. Which is a great motivation for the road ahead of us. There are plenty of improvements we’d still like to make to our dashboards, ranging from smaller ones like adding word count to stats to bigger efforts like tracking community activity over time.

You’re welcome to submit your own idea or start hacking on one of the good first bugs.

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

Javanese and Sundanese locales have been added to Firefox Rocket and are now launching in Indonesia. Congrats to these new teams and to their new localizers! Come check out the Friends of the Lion section below for more information on who they are.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

There are currently few strings landing in Nightly, making it a good time to catch up (if your localization is behind), or test your work. Focus in particular on certificate errors and preferences, given the amount of changes happening around Content blocking, Privacy and Security. The deadline to ship any localization update in Beta (Firefox 63) is October 9.

It’s been a while since we talked about Fluent, but that doesn’t mean that the migration is not progressing. Expect a lot of files moving to Fluent in the coming weeks, thanks to the collaboration with students from the Michigan University.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Firefox Focus for Android is launching a new version this week, and it’s shipping with 9 new locales: Aymara (ay), Galician (gl), Huastec (hus), Marathi (mr), Punjabi (pa-IN), Náhuat Pipil (ppl), K’iche’ (quc), Sundanese (su), Yucatec Maya (yua).

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Activate Mozilla

The Activate Mozilla campaign aims at the grassroots of volunteer contributions. The initiative wants to bring more clarity on what are the most important areas to contribute to at Mozilla right now by providing guidance to mobilizers on how to recruit contributors and create community around meaningful Mozilla projects.

The project is added to Pontoon in a few required languages, with opt-in option for other languages. Once the completion reaches 95%, the locale will be enabled on production. There is no staging server, and any changes in Pontoon will be synced up and pushed to production directly.

Mozilla.org

Mozilla.org has a new tracking protection tour that highlights the content blocking feature. The update is ready for localization, and the tour will be available on production in early October.

Common Voice

The new home page was launched earlier this month. It is only available for 50% of the users during the A/B testing phase. The new look will roll out to all users in the next sprint. The purpose of this redesign is to convert more visitors to the site to contribute. We hope the new looking will help improve the conversion rate we currently have, which is between 10-15%. Though the change doesn’t increase more localization work at string level, the team believes it will bring more people to donating their voices to established locales.

If your language is not available on the current site, the best way to make a request is through Pontoon by following these step-by-step instructions. To learn more about Common Voice project and discussions, check them out on Discourse.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

A very quick update on the fundraising campaign: the September fundraiser is being sent out in English and localization will start very soon

On the Advocacy side, the copyright campaign will continue after the unfortunate vote from the EU Parliament and the next steps are being discussed. The final vote is scheduled towards the end of year.

Stay tuned!

What’s new or coming up in Support

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

  • New homepage. The new homepage was designed and developed by Pramit Singhi as part of Google Summer of Code. Apart from the new design, it also brings several important content changes. It presents Pontoon as the place to localize Mozilla projects, explains the “whys” and “hows” of localization at Mozilla in general, brings a clear call to action, and moves in-context localization demo to a separate page.

Guided tour. Another product of Google Summer of Code is a guided tour of Pontoon, designed and developed by an experienced Pontoon contributor Vishal Sharma. It’s linked from the homepage as a secondary call to action, and consists of two pieces: the actual tour, which explains the translation user interface, and the tutorial project, which demonstrates more details through carefully chosen strings.

  • System projects. Vishal also developed the ability to mark projects as “system projects”, which are hidden from dashboards. The aforementioned Tutorial project and Pontoon Intro are both treated as system projects.
  • Read-only locales. Last month we enabled locales previously not in Pontoon, in read-only mode. That means dashboards and the API now present full project status across all locales, all Mozilla translations are accessible in the Locales tab, and the Translation Memory of locales previously not available in Pontoon has improved. Check out the newsgroup for more details on which locales were enabled for which projects.
  • Unchanged filter improvement. Thanks to Raivis Dejus, the Unchanged filter now works as expected. Previously, it returned all strings for which the source string is the same as one of the suggestions. Now, it only compares source strings with active translations (show in the string list).

 

Pontoon tips

Here’s a quick Pontoon tip that a lot of people already know, but can still help some.

Pontoon has a feature that automatically identifies specific elements in strings, highlights them and makes them clickable. Here’s an example:

This feature is meant to allow you to easily copy placeables into your translation by clicking them. This saves you time and reduces the risk of introducing typos if you manually rewrite them, or partially select them while copy/pasting them.

One common misconception is to think those elements should always be kept in English. While it’s certainly true in multiple cases (variables, HTML tags like in the screenshot above…), there are several places where Pontoon highlights parts of a string that could or should be translated.

Here’s an example where all the highlighted elements should be translated:

Here Pontoon thinks those words are acronyms, and that you could potentially keep them in your translation. It turns out here they are not acronyms, it’s just a sentence in full caps, so we can simply ignore the highlights and translate it like any other string.

Here’s a last example where Pontoon successfully detects an acronym, and it could have been kept but the localizer decided to translate it anyway (and it’s okay):

To summarize the feature, Pontoon does its best to guess what parts of a string you are likely to keep in your translation, but these are suggestions only.

Also remember, you’re not alone! If you have a doubt, you can always reach out to the l10n PM owning the project. They will clarify the context for you and help you better identify false positives.

Events

  • Jakarta (Indonesia) Rocket Sprint held on August 11-12 added two new languages to the product. Javanese contributor Akhlis summarized the weekend activity with his blog.
  • Pune (India) l10n community event just happened (Sept. 1-2). Come check out some pictures:
  • 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)

Friends of the Lion

  • Ali Demirtaş, who surpassed the goal of over 1 thousand suggestions for Turkish.
  • Congratulations to the contributors who have helped launch Firefox Rocket in Javanese and Sundanese! Here they are:
    • Javanese Team:
      • Rizki Dwi Kelimutu
      • Dian Ina Mahendra
      • Armen Ringgo Sukiro
      • Nur Fahmia
      • Nuri Abidin
      • Akhlis Purnomo
    • Sundanese Team:
      • Fauzan Alfi Agirachman
      • Muhammad Fadhil
      • Mira Marsellia
      • Yusup Ramdani
      • Iskandar Alisyahbana Adnan
  • Ahmad Nourallah, who localized numerous Support articles as part of the “Top 20” month.

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 Report: August Edition

Théo Chevalier

2 responses

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!

After a quick pause in July, your primary source of localization information at Mozilla is back!

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

As localization drivers, we’re currently working on rethinking and improving the experience of multilingual users in Firefox. While this is a project that will span through several releases of Firefox, the first part of this work already landed in Nightly (Firefox 63): it’s a language switcher in Preferences, hidden behind the intl.multilingual.enabled preference, that currently allows to switch to another language already installed on the system (via language packs).

The next step will be to allow installing a language pack directly from Preferences (for the release version), and install dictionaries when user chooses to add a new language. For that reason, we’re creating a list of dictionaries for each locale. For more details, and discover how you can help, read this thread on dev-l10n.

We’re also working on building a list of native language names to use in the language switcher; once again, check dev-l10n for more info.

Quite a few strings landed in the past weeks for Nightly:

  • Pages for certificate errors have a new look. To test them, you currently need to change the setting browser.security.newcerterrorpage.enabled to true in about:config. The testing instructions available in our documentation remain valid.
  • There’s a whole new section dedicated to Content blocking in preferences, enabled by default in Nightly.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

It’s summer time in the western hemisphere, which means many projects (and people!) are taking a break – which also means not many strings are expected to land in mobile land during this period.

One notable thing is that Firefox iOS v13 was just released, and Marathi is a new locale this time around. Congratulations to the team.

On Firefox for Android front, Bosnian (bs), Occitan (oc) and Triqui (trs) are new locales that shipped with on current release version, v61. And we just added English from Canada (en-CA) and Ligurian (lij) to our Nightly v63 multi-locale build, which is available through the Google Play Store. Congratulations to everyone!

Other than that, most mobile projects are on a bit of a hiatus for the rest of the month. However, do expect some new and exciting projects to come in the pipeline over the course of the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more information!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

AMO

About two weeks ago, over 160 sets of curated add-on titles and descriptions were landed in Pontoon. Once localized, they will be included in a Shield Study to be launched on August 13. The study will run for about 2 months. This is probably the largest and longest study the AMO team has conducted.

The current Disco Pane (about:addons) lists curated extensions and themes which are manually programmed. TAAR (Telemetry Aware Add-on Recommender) is a new machine-learning extension discovery system that makes personalized recommendations based on information available in Firefox standard Telemetry. Based on TAAR’s potential to enhance content discovery by surfacing more diversified and personalized recommendations, the team wants to integrate TAAR as a product feature of Disco Pane.  It’s called “Disco-TAAR”.

The localized titles and description will increase users’ likelihood to install and install more than one. To be part of this study, you need to make sure your locale has completed at least 80% of the AMO strings by August 12.

Common Voice

Like many of you, the team is taking a summer break. However, when they come back, they promise to introduce a new home page at the beginning of next month. There should be no localization impact.

There are three ways to contributing to this project:

  1. Web part (through Pontoon)
  2. Sentence collection
  3. Recording

We now have 70 locales showing interest in the project. Many have reached 100% completion or close to it. Congratulations to reaching the first milestones. However, your work shouldn’t stop here. The sentence collection is a major challenge that all the teams face before the fun recording part can begin. Ruben Martin from the Open Innovation team addresses the challenges in this blog post. If you want to learn more about Common Voice project, sign up to Discourse where lots of discussions take place.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

August fundraising emails will be sent to English audience only, the team realizes a lot of people, especially Europeans are gone on holidays and won’t be reading emails. A lot of localizers should be away as well, so they decided it was best to skip this email and focus on September fundraiser.

The Internet Health Report team has started working on next year’s report and is planning to send a localized email in French, German and Spanish to collect examples of projects that improve the health of the internet, links to great new research studies or ideas for topics they should include in the upcoming report.

As for the localized campaign work, it is slowing down in August for several reasons, one of them being an ongoing process to hire two new team members to expand the advocacy campaigns in Europe: a campaign manager, and a partnership organizer. If you know potential candidates, that would be great if you could forward them these offers!

That being said, you can expect some movement on the Copyright campaign towards the end of the month as the next vote is currently scheduled on September 12th.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

File priorities and deadlines

The most critical piece of information coming from the tags feature is file priority. It used to be pretty hard to discover, because it was only available in the rarely used Tags tab. We fixed that by exposing file priority in the Resources tab of the Localization dashboard. Similarly, we also added a deadline column to the localization dashboard.

Read-only locales

Pontoon introduced the ability to enable locales for projects in read-only mode. They act the same as regular (read-write) locales, except that users cannot make any edits through Pontoon (by submitting or reviewing translations or suggestions, uploading files or performing batch actions).

That allows us to access translations from locales that do not use Pontoon for localization of some of their projects, which brings a handful of benefits. For example, dashboards and the API will now present full project status across all locales, all Mozilla translations will be accessible in the Locales tab (which is not the case for localizations like the Italian Firefox at the moment) and the Translation Memory of locales currently not available in Pontoon will improve.

Expect more details about this feature as soon as we start enabling read-only locales.

Translation display improvements

Thanks to a patch by Vishal Sharma, translations status in the History tab is now also shown to unauthenticated users and non-Translators. We’ve also removed rejected suggestions from the string list and the editor.

Events

  • The Jakarta l10n event has taken place last weekend with the local community. Some of the things we worked on include: localizing Rocket browser in Javanese and Sundanese, localizing corresponding SUMO articles, refining style guides… and much more!
  • 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

Common Voice

Many communities have made significant progress in the third step: donating their voices. In July, recording were made in the following languages and more.

  • 33 hours English
  • 60 hours Catalan
  • 30 hours Mandarin
  • 24 hours Kabyle
  • 18 hours French
  • 14 hours German
  • 9 other languages at < 10 hours

For the complete list of all the languages, check the language status dashboard.

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.