On April 28th, Mozilla successfully launched its VPN Client in two new countries: Germany and France. While the VPN Client has been available since 2020 in several countries (U.S., U.K., Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and Malaysia), the user interface was only available in English.
This blog post describes the process and steps needed to make this type of product localizable within the Mozilla ecosystem.
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.
New localizers
Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!
On April 3rd, as part of a broader strategy change at Mozilla, we moved our existing mailing lists (dev-l10n, dev-l10n-web, dev-l10n-new-locales) to Discourse. If you are involved in localization, please make sure to create an account on Discourse and set up your profile to receive notifications when there are new messages in the Localization category.
We also decided to shut down our existing Telegram channel dedicated to localization. This was originally created to fill a gap, given its broad availability on mobile, and the steep entry barrier required to use IRC. In the meantime, IRC has been replaced by chat.mozilla.org, which offers a much better experience on mobile platforms. Please make sure to check out the dedicated Wiki page with instructions on how to connect, and join our #l10n-community room.
For all localizers working on Firefox, there is now a Firefox L10n Newsletter, including all information regarding the next major release of Firefox (89, aka MR1). Here you can find the latest issue, and you can also subscribe to this thread in discourse to receive a message every time there’s an update.
One important update is that the Firefox 89 cycle will last 2 extra weeks in Beta. These are the important deadlines:
As a consequence, the Nightly cycle for Firefox 90 will also be two weeks longer.
Like Firefox desktop, Firefox for iOS and Firefox for Android are still on the road to the MR1 release. I’ve published some details on Discourse here. Dates and info are still relevant, nothing changes in terms of l10n.
All strings for Firefox for iOS should already have landed.
Most strings for Firefox for Android should have landed.
The Voice Fill and Firefox Voice Beta extensions are being retired.
The project is transitioning to Mozilla Foundation. The announcement was made earlier this week. Some of the Mozilla staff who worked closely with the project will continue working on it in their new roles. The web part, the part that contributes to the site localization will remain in Pontoon.
Beta was launched on March 17. The sprint cycle is now aligned with Firefox Nightly moving forward. The next code push will be on April 21. The cutoff to include localized strings is a week earlier than the code push date.
All locales are disabled with the exception of fr, ja, zh-CN and zh-TW. There is a blog on this decision. The team may add back more languages later. If it does happen, the attributes to the work done by community members will be retained in Pontoon. Nothing will be lost.
Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact one of the l10n-drivers and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out (see list at the bottom)!
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.
Having the ability to search through existing translations is a crucial tool for assuring translation consistency. It allows you to see how the same expression was translated in the past or verify that the translation you intend to use is consistent with the rest of the corpus.
Pontoon tries to automate that as much as possible with Machinery suggestions by querying Translation Memory as soon as the string is opened for translation. That being said, Translation Memory is only queried for strings as a whole. If you’re interested in the translation of a word “file”, but your corpus only uses that word as part of longer strings like “Select a file…” or “Source file uploaded”, Machinery won’t find any matches.
Concordance search allows you to search Translation Memory for a specific word or phrase. Thanks to April and Jotes, it’s now available as a standalone feature in Pontoon. No more searching in the All Projects view in a separate tab!
Simply type some search text into the Concordance Search text field in the Machinery tab and hit Enter. Every search keyword is searched separately, unless it’s part of a phrase within double quotes – in this case the entire phrase within the quotes is searched as a whole. Each search result is accompanied with a list of projects it belongs to.
Concordance search
New localizers
Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!
First of all, let’s all congratulate the Silesian (szl) team for making their way into the official builds of Firefox. After spending several months in Nightly, they’re now ready for general audience and will ride the trains to Beta and Release with Firefox 87.
Upcoming deadlines:
This means that, as of February 23, we’ll be only two cycles away from the next big release of Firefox (89), which will include the UI redesign internally called Proton. Several strings have already been exposed for localization, and you can start testing them – always in a new profile! – by manually setting these preferences to true in about:config:
It’s a constant work in progress, so expect the UI to change frequently, as new elements are added every few days.
One important thing to note: English will change several elements of the UI from Title Case to Sentence case. These changes will not require locales to retranslate all the strings, but it also expects each locale to have clearly defined rules in their style guides about the correct capitalization to use for each part of the UI. If your locale is following the same capitalization rules as en-US, then you’ll need to manually change these strings to match the updated version.
We’ll have more detailed follow-ups in the coming week about Proton, highlighting the key areas to test. In the meantime, make sure that your style guides are in good shape, and get in touch if you don’t know how to work on them in GitHub.
You may have noticed some changes to the Firefox for Android (“Fenix”) release schedule – that affects in turn our l10n schedule for the project.
In fact, Firefox for Android is now mirroring the Firefox Desktop schedule (as much as possible). While you will notice that the Pontoon l10n deadlines are not quite the same between Firefox Android and Firefox Desktop, their release cadence will be the same, and this will help streamline our main products.
Firefox for iOS remains unchanged for now – although the team is aiming to streamline the release process as well. However, this also depends on Apple, so this may take more time to implement.
Concerning the Proton redesign (see section above about Desktop), we still do not know to what extent it will affect mobile. Stay tuned!
The payment settings feature is going to be updated later this month through a Beta release. It will be open for localization at a later date. Stay tuned!
Migration to Fluent format continues, and the webdev team aims at wrapping up migration by the end of February. Kindly remind all the communities to check the migrated files for warnings, fix them right away. Otherwise, the strings will appear in English in an activated page on production. Or the page may resort to English because it can’t meet the activation threshold of 80% completion. Please follow the priority of the pages and work through them one at a time.
The project will be moved to Mozilla Foundation later this year. More details will be shared as soon as they become available.
Fairly small release as the transition details are being finalized.
Since the beginning of 2021, SUMO has been supporting Firefox 85. You can see the full list of articles that we added and updated for Firefox 85 in the SUMO Sprint wiki page here.
We also have good news from the Dutch team who’s been changing their team formation and finally managed to localize 100% support articles in SUMO. This is a huge milestone for the team, who has been a little bit behind in the past couple of years.
There are a lot more interesting changes coming up in our pipeline. Feel free to join SUMO Matrix room to discuss or just say hi.
Image by Elio Qoshi
Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact one of the l10n-drivers and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out (see list at the bottom)!
New localizers
Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!
Upcoming deadlines:
As anticipated in the last report, this release cycle is longer than usual (6 weeks instead of 4), to accommodate for the end of year holidays in Europe and the US.
The number of new strings remains pretty low, but expect this to change during the first half of 2021, when we should have new content, thanks to a mix of new features and old interfaces revisited. There will also be changes to improve consistency around the use of Title Case and Sentence case for English. This won’t result in new strings to translate for other locales, but it’s a good reminder that each locale should set and follow its own rules, and they should be documented in style guides.
Since we’re at the end of year, here are a few numbers for Firefox:
[1] Disclaimer: other browsers make it quite difficult to understand which languages are effectively supported (there’s no way to switch language, and they don’t necessarily work in the open). Other vendors seem to also have a low entry barrier when it comes to adding a new language, and listing it as available. On the other hand, at Mozilla we require high priority parts to be completely translated, or very close, and a sustainable community before shipping.
Published on behalf of April Bowler.
When we first shipped the ability to add comments within Pontoon we mentioned that there were some additional features that would be coming, and I’m happy to announce that those features are now active.
What are those features, you say? Let’s have a look:
If you have a comment that you need to ensure is seen by a particular person on the project, you can now ‘mention’ that person by typing the “@” symbol and their name. Once the comment is submitted that person will then be notified that they have been mentioned in a comment.
Project Managers can now Pin comments within the Comments panel in the 3rd column. This will not only add a visible pin to the comment, it will also place the comment within the source string Metadata section in the middle column and make it visible globally across all locales.
Also present in the top section of the middle column is a new button that allows localizers to request more context or report an issue in the source string. When utilized this button will open the Comments panel and insert a mention for the contact person of the project. This will ensure that the contact person receives a notification about the comment.
Request Context or Report Issue button allows localizers to ping Project Managers, which can pin their responses to become globally visible for everyone.
As you can probably tell by the descriptions, all of these features work hand-in-hand with each other to help improve the workflow and communication within Pontoon.
For example, if you run into an ambiguous string, you can request context and the contact person will clarify it for you. If the meaning of the source string is not clear for the general audience, they can also pin their response, which will make it visible to everyone and even notify users who already translated or reviewed the string.
It has truly been a pleasure to work on this feature, first as part of my Outreachy internship and then as a contributor, and I hope that it has a positive impact on your work within Pontoon. I look forward to making continued contributions.
Upcoming deadlines:
The number of new strings remains pretty low, but there was a change that landed without new string IDs: English switched from a hyphen (-) to an em dash (–) as separator for window titles. Since this is a choice that belongs to each locale, and the current translation might be already correct, we decided to not invalidate all existing translations and notify localizers instead.
You can see the details of the strings that changed in this changeset. The full list of IDs, in case you want to search for them in Pontoon:
Alternatively, you can search for “ – “ in Pontoon, but you’ll have to skim through a lot of results, since Pontoon searches also in comments.
Firefox for iOS v29, as well as iOS v14, both recently shipped – bringing with them the possibility to make Firefox your default browser for the first time ever!
v29 also introduced a Firefox homescreen widget, and more widgets will likely come soon. Congratulations to all for helping localize these awesome new features!
v30 strings have just recently been exposed on Pontoon, and the deadline for l10n strings completion is November 4th. Screenshots will be updated for testing very soon.
Firefox for Android (“Fenix”) is currently open for localizing v83 strings. The next couple of weeks should be used for completing your current pending strings, as well as testing your work for the release. Take a look at our updated docs here!
Recently, the monthly WNP pages that went out with the Firefox releases contained content promoting features that were not available for global markets or campaign messages that targeted select few markets. In these situations, for all the other locales, the page was always redirected to the evergreen WNP page. As a result, please make it a high priority if your locale has not completed the page.
More pages were added and migrated to Fluent format. For migrated content, the web team has decided not to make any edits until there is a major content update or page layout redesign. Please take the time to resolve errors first as the page may have been activated. If a placeable error is not fixed, it will be shown on production.
Both projects now have a new point of contact. If you want to add a new language or have any questions with the strings, send an email directly to the person first. Follow the projects’ latest development through the channels on Discourse. The l10n-drivers will continue to provide support to both teams through the Pontoon platform.
Please help us localize the following articles for Firefox 82 (desktop and Android):
Spring cleaning on the road to Django 3. Our new contributor Philipp started the process of upgrading Django to the latest release. In a period of 12 days, he landed 12(!) patches, ranging from library updates and replacing out-of-date libraries with native Python and Django capabilities to making our testing infrastructure more consistent and dropping unused code. Well done, Philipp! Thanks to Axel and Jotes for the reviews.
Firefox for Android docs have been updated to reflect the recent changes introduced by our migration to the new “Fenix” browser. We invite you to take a look as there are many changes to the Firefox for Android localization workflow.
Kudos to these long time Mozillians who found creative ways to spread the words promoting their languages and sharing their experience by taking the public airways.
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)
Image by Elio Qoshi
Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact one of the l10n-drivers and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out (see list at the bottom)!
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.
New localizers
Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!
As part of the effort to streamline and rationalize the localization infrastructure, following the recent lay-offs, we have decided to decommission Elmo. Elmo is the project name of what has been the backbone of our localization infrastructure for over 10 years, and its public facing part was hosted on l10n.mozilla.org (el as in “el-10-en (l10n)”, m(ozilla), o(rg) = elmo).
The practical consequences of this change are:
Upcoming deadlines:
As you might have noticed, the number of new strings in Firefox has significantly decreased, with DevTools becoming less actively developed. Now more than ever it’s a good time to:
This last month, as announced – and as you have probably noticed – we have been reducing the number, and priority, of mobile products to localize. We are now focusing much more on Firefox for Android and Firefox for iOS – our original flagship products for mobile. Please thus refer to the “star” metric on Pontoon to prioritize your work for mobile.
The Firefox for Android schedule from now on should give two weeks out of four for localization work – as it did for Focus. This means strings will be landing during two weeks in Pontoon – and then you will have two weeks to work on those strings so they can make it into the next version. Check the deadline section in Pontoon to know when the l10n deadline for the next release is.
Concerning iOS: with iOS 14 we can now set Firefox as default! Thanks to everyone who has helped localize the new strings that will enable globally this functionality.
The support will continue with reduced staff. Though there won’t be new features introduced in the next six months, the team is still committed to fixing high priority bugs, adding newly requested languages, and releasing updated dataset. It will take longer to implement than before. Please follow the project’s latest update on Discourse.
The project is being spun out of Mozilla as an independent open source project. It will be renamed from Mozilla WebThings to WebThings and will be moved to a new home at webthings.io. For other FAQ, please check out here. When the transition is complete, we will update everyone as soon as it becomes available.
It would be great to get the following articles localized in Indonesian in the upcoming release for Firefox for iOS:
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.
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.
As you are probably aware, Mozilla just went through a massive round of layoffs. About 250 people were let go, reducing the overall size of the workforce by a quarter. The l10n-drivers team was heavily impacted, with Axel Hecht (aka Pike) leaving the company.
We are still in the process of understanding how the reorganization will affect our work and the products we localize. A first step was to remove some projects from Pontoon, and we’ll make sure to communicate any further changes in our communication channels.
The “bridge” between our Matrix and Telegram channel, i.e. the tool synchronizing content between the two, has been working only in one direction for a few weeks. For this reason, and given the unsupported status of this tool, we decided to remove it completely.
As of now:
If you haven’t used Matrix yet, we encourage you to set it up following the instructions available in the Mozilla Wiki. You can also set an email address in your profile, to receive notifications (like pings) when you’re offline.
We plan to keep the Telegram channel around for now, but we might revisit this decision in the future.
Upcoming deadlines:
In terms of content and new features, most of the changes are around the new modal print preview, which can be currently tested on Nightly.
The new Firefox for Android has been rolled out at 100%! You should therefore have either been upgraded from the older version (or will be in just a little bit) – or you can download it directly from the Play Store here.
Congratulations to everyone who has made this possible!
For the next Firefox for Android release, we are expecting string freeze to start towards the end of the week, which will give localizers two weeks to complete localizing and testing.
Concerning Firefox for iOS: v29 strings have been exposed on Pontoon. We are still working out screenshots for testing with iOS devs at the moment, but these should be available soon and as usual from the Pontoon project interface.
On another note, and as mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, due to the recent lay-offs, we have had to deactivate some projects from Pontoon. The mobile products are currently: Scryer, Firefox Lite and Lockwise iOS. More may be added to this list soon, so stay tuned. Once more, thanks to all the localizers who have contributed their time and effort to these projects across the years. Your help has been invaluable for Mozilla.
The Common Voice team is greatly impacted due to the changes in recent announcement. The team has stopped the two-week sprint cycle and is working in a maintenance mode right now. String updates and new language requests would take longer time to process due to resource constraints
Some other changes to the project before the reorg:
An updated firefox/welcome/page4.ftl with new layout will be ready for localization in a few days. The turnaround time is rather short. Be on the lookout for it.
Along with this update is the temporary page called banners/firefox-daylight-launch.ftl that promotes Fenix. It has a life of a few weeks. Please localize it as soon as possible. Once done, you will see the localized banner on https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ on production.
The star priority ratings in Pontoon are also revised. The highest priority pages are firefox/all.ftl, firefox/new/*.ftl, firefox/whatsnew/*.ftl, and brands.ftl. The next level priority pages are the shared files. Unless a page has a hard deadline to complete, the rest are normal priority with a 3-star rating and you can take time to localize them.
The team is completely dissolved due to the reorg. At the moment, the project would not take any new language requests or update the repo with changes in Pontoon. The project is actively working to move into a community-maintained state. We will update everyone as soon as that information becomes available.
The Foundation website homepage got a major revamp, strings have been exposed to the relevant locales in the Engagement and Foundation website projects. There’s no strict deadline, you can complete this anytime. The content will be published live regularly, with a first push happening in a few days.
Download Terminology as TBX
We’ve added the ability to download Terminology from Pontoon in the standardized TBX file format, which allows you to exchange it with other users and systems. To access the feature, click on your user icon in the top-right section of the translation workspace and select “Download Terminology”.
Improving Machinery with SYSTRAN
We have an update on the work we’ve been doing with SYSTRAN to provide you with better machine translation options in Pontoon.
SYSTRAN has published three NMT models (German, French, and Spanish) based on contributions of Mozilla localizers. They are available in the SYSTRAN Marketplace as free and open source and accessible to any existing SYSTRAN NMT customers. In the future, we hope to make those models available beyond the SYSTRAN system.
These models have been integrated with Pontoon and are available in the Machinery tab. Please report any feedback that you have for them, as we want to make sure these are a useful resource for your contributions.
We’ll be working with SYSTRAN to learn how to build the models for new language pairs in 2021, which should widely expand the language coverage.
Search with Enter
From now on you need to press Enter to trigger search in the string list. This change unifies the behaviour of the string list search box and the Machinery search box, which despite similar looks previously hadn’t worked the same way. Former had been searching after the last keystroke (with a 500 ms delay), while latter after Enter was pressed.
Search on every keystroke is great when it’s fast, but string list search is not always fast. It becomes really tedious if more than 500 ms pass between the keystrokes and search gets triggered too early.
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.
New localizers
Welcome Prasanta Hembram, Cloud-Prakash and Chakulu Hembram, from the newly created Santali community! They are currently localizing Firefox for iOS in Santali Ol Chiki script.
Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!
Santali (Ol-Chiki script “sat-Olck”) has been added to Pontoon.
Upcoming deadlines:
As explained in a recent email to dev-l10n, we’re in the process of removing English terms that make direct or indirect references to racial oppression and discrimination.
In terms of impact on localization, that mainly involves the Master Password feature, which is now called Primary Password, starting from Firefox 80.
A Primary Password is a password that unlocks the other passwords saved locally in Firefox. Primary passwords are not synced between profiles or devices.
We ask all localizers to keep these implications in mind when translating, and to evaluate the translations previously used for “Master Password” in this light. If you identify other terms in your localizations or in the en-US version of our products that you feel are racially-charged, please raise the issue in Bugzilla and CC any of the l10n-drivers.
Most string changes regarding this update already landed in the last few days, and are available for translation in Pontoon. There is also going to be an alert in Firefox 80, to warn the users about the change:
If your translations for “Master Password” and “Primary Password” are identical, you can leave that string empty, otherwise you should translate “Formerly known as Master Password” accordingly, so that the warning is displayed. The string should be exposed in Pontoon shortly after this l10n report is published.
Make sure to test the new about:welcome in Nightly. As usual, it’s a good idea to test this type of changes in a new profile.
Note that a few more string updates and changes are expected to land this week, before Firefox 80 moves to beta.
Firefox 80 has a new Experiments section in Preferences (about:preferences#experimental). By the end of this Nightly cycle, there should be about 20 experiments listed there, generating a sizable content to translate, and often quite technical.
These are experiments that existed in Firefox for a while (since Firefox 70), but could only be manually enabled in about:config before this UI existed. Once the initial landing is complete, this feature will not require such a large amount of translation on a regular basis.
Most of these experiments will be available only in Nightly, and will be hidden in more stable versions, so it’s important – as always – to test your translations in Nightly. Given this, you should also prioritize translation for these strings accordingly, and focus on more visible parts first (always check the priority assigned to files in Pontoon).
As many are already aware, the l10n deadline for getting strings into the Fenix release version was this past Saturday July 18th. Out of the 90 locales working on Fenix on Pontoon, 85 made it to release! Congratulations to everyone for their hard work and dedication in trying to keep the same mobile experience to all our global users! This was a very critical step in the adventure of our new Android mobile browser.
Since we are now past string freeze, we have exposed new strings for the upcoming release. More details on the l10n timeline will come soon, so stay tuned.
There will also be a new version of Firefox for iOS (v28) soon: the l10n deadline to complete strings – as well as testing – is today, Wednesday July 22nd (PDT, end of day).
We have screenshots in Taskcluster now so that you can test your work (vs Google Drive): feel free to send me feedback about those. A big thank you to the iOS team (especially Isabel Rios and Johan Lorenzo from RelEng) for getting these ready and updated regularly!
The web team continues making progress in migrating files to Fluent. Please take some time to review the files. Here are a few things to pay attention to:
String with a warning: It is important to check the strings with warnings first. They are usually caused by brands and product names not converted correctly because the names were translated. As long as these strings contain warnings, they can’t be activated at string level on production. Localized string with a warning will fallback to the English string. Since page activation threshold is at 80% completion, this means a page that was fully localized in the old format, if containing a warning, will appear to mix with English text.
String with error but no warning: All migrated pages need a thorough review. Even when a page doesn’t have warnings, it may contain errors that a script can’t detect. Here is an example:
Testing on staging: Other than a few files that are “shared” or for forms, meaning the content in the file is not page specific, most files have a page specific URL for review. Here is an example to figure out how to test Firefox/enterprise.ftl:
Keeping track of Machinery translations.
Pontoon now stores Machinery source(s) of translations copied from the Machinery panel. The feature will help us evaluate performance of each Machinery source and make improvements in the future.
It should also help reviewers, who can instantly see if and which Machinery source was used while suggesting a translation. If it was, a “Copy” icon will appear over the author’s avatar and the Machinery sources will be revealed on hover.
We have a new locale available in Nightly for Firefox desktop: Silesian (szl). In less than 5 months, they managed to get over 60% completion, with most of the high priority parts close to 100%. Kudos to Rafał and Grzegorz for the great work.
Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact one of the l10n-drivers and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out (see list at the bottom)!
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.