Mozilla L10N

L10n Report: October Edition

Oct 11 2017

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

Mika just started getting involved in the Finnish localization team. Welcome Mika!

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 57 is now in Beta. The deadline to get your localization updates into release is November 1st, please make sure to catch up with missing strings (if you need) and get as many eyes as possible on the versions of Firefox localized in your language.

On a positive note, now that cross-channel is ready and running, you only have to translate strings once for both Nightly and Beta.

Going into localization details: we’ll soon start localizing the Form Autofill system add-on, while we’re studying how to expose strings for about:studies.

Nepali (ne-NP), after a bit of a pause, is trying to ride the release train with 58: if you speak the language, download the Nightly build and help them finding and fixing issues.

Do you speak Assamese, Interlingua, Lao, Latgalian, Maithili, Malayalam, or Tagalog and want to help? Read this blog post.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Focus iOS and Focus Android are not only now following a bi-weekly release cadence – but the releases are finally synced! Check out the Focus iOS release schedule, as well as the Focus Android one, for more specific details. Note that we do not put the l10n deadlines in Pontoon anymore, given we would have to change them every two weeks.

Firefox iOS strings for v10 strings should be coming shortly. There will be some great improvements with the v10, so stayed tuned on the dev-l10n mailing list to know when that happens (l10n deadline will also be entered in Pontoon)!

On a related note: have you noticed that Firefox iOS v9 now has Tracking Protection turned on by default for Private Browsing mode – and can easily be enabled for normal mode? It was one of the most requested features, and was therefore implemented. Firefox iOS 9.0 also provides improved bookmarks synchronization across devices. It makes the sync functionality – updating passwords, history and bookmarks between mobile and desktop – better and seamless.

On the Focus Android side, there are now multiple tabs! More information about the new Firefox iOS and Focus Android features can be found here. You can also join the public beta for Focus on Android channel on the Google Play Store now. Setup auto-update in the Google Play store to automatically get a new beta version once it’s available. More details here.

And last but not least, there’s a new mobile project targeting Indonesia, called Firefox Rocket. The soft launch was Monday, and it was released as a public beta. It is an experimental fast and lightweight browser made for the needs of emerging markets. The actual launch is targeted some time in November. If you are not in Indonesia, you can try out the app via the apk here.

As you can see, many of our projects are not only growing and improving – more and more new ones are created as well! As part of this ongoing growth, we’d also like to expand the number of localizations that we ship on mobile. As a first step in this direction, we’d like to invite anyone speaking Swahili or Amharic to come join the localization effort. Feel free to contact Delphine about this if you’re interested!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

[Mozilla.org]: Thanks to all the communities for working hard to clear the web project dashboard. The anticipated new and updated pages will be coming your way on a weekly basis in the next few weeks. Keep an eye on the mailing list and always refer to the web dashboard for pending tasks.

[Marketing]: Firefox Rocket campaign messages written for the Indonesian market were prepared and localized by a local marketing agency. Huge thanks to the Indonesian community who was involved in reviewing and revising the campaign messages.

[Engagement]: Expect requests for the monthly snippets and emails in the default language sets in the weeks leading up to Firefox Quantum launch. Also the monthly email content is now staged in Pontoon for localization. If your community wants to move this project from spreadsheet to Pontoon, let us know!

[Legal]:

Firefox Privacy Notice was rewritten for #56 and localized in select few languages. Thanks to all who took the time to review and fix linguistic and formatting errors. Your feedback was relayed to the agency. There will be an update for #57. Impacted teams will be notified when the updates are ready for review.
Firefox + Cliqz Privacy Notice in German: This was rewritten but largely leveraged from the new Firefox Privacy Notice. German docs were reviewed by legal counsel hired by legal team. There could be a revision as well.
Firefox Rocket Privacy Notice in indonesian: This is a brand new doc for a brand new product. The l10n community will be notified when it is ready for review.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

We are happy to report some nice improvements to the donate experience, we’ve finally added support for SEPA donations! And we also removed fees for checks in foreign currencies. All that for both donations to Mozilla Foundation and Thunderbird. We expect this to have a positive impact on donation, and to lower frustration of our donors. We’ve updated the FAQs and donation instructions, so if your locale is not complete for the Fundraising project, help us reach 100% before our big push over the next weeks!

Next steps for fundraising are tweaking our snippets (a longer copy test should be starting really soon), then localizing emails starting mid-November that should be sent at the end of November and until the end of the year.

After several schedule changes at the European Parliament, the Copyright campaign is kicking off again this week.

We’ve got great findings to report after analyzing the (many) responses to the IoT survey launched in August. If you want to be among the first people to read them, help us localize our report in German, Spanish, French, Italian or Brazilian Portuguese!

We are also working in the U.S. with Univision on a holiday guide in English and Spanish featuring product reviews (of toys, game systems, fitness trackers, home assistants, smart TVs, and more) written by experts in our network. The main goal is to help people make educated choices, taking privacy & security into consideration before buying new connected devices.

Finally, MozFest is starting in a few days in London! If you’re attending, you may run into Théo. Say hi!

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

As of the last week of September Pontoon exposes data about projects and locales through a publicly available API. Read more about it in the blog post. If you’re interested in the planning process of the upcoming milestones refer to the L10n:Pontoon/API wikipage.

We’ve also landed several optimizations; searching for strings is now 60% faster and we’ve also improved load times of various pages:

What’s new or coming up in Transvision

In the next few days, Transvision will support cross-channel for Gecko-based products, this means you will be able to search for strings in Beta and Nightly from a single place (and Release as soon as 57 is released).

We are also adding support for Focus for iOS and Android! There will also be some minor improvements, stay tuned.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

Several documents have been published over the last month, check them out!

How to localize and test fundraising website (donate.mozilla.org)
How to localize and test Thimble
How to localize and test MDN
Reviewing translations within your community: details the best attitude to adopt when reviewing and how you can share constructive feedback.
Using l10n resources while translating: learn more about the differences between terminology, translation memory and style guides and how each of them will help you produce high quality translations.

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)

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

Benny Chandra is instrumental in the success of a brand new Mozilla product launch in Indonesia – a test market. He led the community in advising marketing team the message in English, reviewing and revising localized copy from a local marketing agency. Thank you for being always responsive and for finding the time to address requests from the marketing team.
Kohei’s work and impact can be seen in many web projects. He is the unofficial liaison between the legal team and l10n team. He is the go-to person to review updates, manage and coordinate staging and production push which is manual. His involvement is much needed with recent rounds of legal documentation updates.

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

Dev.l10n mailing list and Dev.l10n.web mailing list – where project updates happen. If you are a localizer, then you should be following this
Facebook group: it’s new! Come check it out!
Twitter
Telegram (contact one of the l10n-drivers below so we will add you)
L10n blog
#l10n irc channel: this wiki page will help you get set up with IRC. For L10n, we use the #l10n channel for all general discussion. You can also find a list of IRC channels in other languages here.

Questions? Want to get involved?

If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:
- Delphine – l10n Project Manager for mobile
- Peiying – l10n Project Manager for mozilla.org, marketing, and legal
- Francesco Lodolo (flod) – l10n Project Manager for desktop
- Théo Chevalier – l10n Project Manager for Mozilla Foundation
- Axel (Pike) – l10n Tech Team Lead
- Staś – Fluent L10n tamer
- Zibi (gandalf) – L10n/Intl Platform Software Engineer
- Matjaž – Pontoon dev
- Jeff Beatty (gueroJeff) – l10n-drivers manager

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.

Exposing Pontoon Data Through API

Oct 10 2017

Staś Małolepszy

2 responses

Application Programming Interface, or API for short, is how computer programs talk to each other. As of the last week of September Pontoon exposes data about projects and locales through a publicly available API.

In this first iteration we focused on one use-case outlined in bug 1302053.

It would be really useful being able to retrieve information from Pontoon via API. Interesting queries:

Stats for a locale: supported projects, status of each project.

Stats for a project: supported locales, incomplete locales, complete locales.

After a thorough discussion and research we settled on using GraphQL. GraphQL is both a language for describing the API queries and a runtime for running these queries against the real data. It was created by Facebook and has lately seen a lot of adoption due to its declarative nature, predictability of results and the GraphiQL IDE which allows to easily explore the API and test different queries in the browser.

With GraphQL, the users of the API have precise control over the data the API returns. In the following example, the API will return a list of all active projects and for each project listed only its name will be retrieved.

query {
    projects {
        name
    }
}

It’s also easy to query data spanning multiple relations in the data model. In the following example for every active project the API will also return a list of locales for which the project has been enabled.

query {
    projects {
        name
        localizations {
            locale {
                name
            }
        }
    }
}

Queries can be made using GET and POST requests alike. Here are a few real-life examples which illustrate what’s already possible in the current version of the API:

In an effort to make it easy to get started with the API and make the available data discoverable, the first milestone of the API ships with the GraphiQL IDE. GraphiQL is a query editor which runs in the browser. You can use it to explore the API and test queries in the browser. Currently it’s only available in local deployments of Pontoon at http://localhost:8000/graphql. In the future we plan to enable it on production as well.

The end goal is to expose almost all data that Pontoon stores and processes: translations and suggestions, contributors’ activity, notifications and others. Ultimately the API will also allow writing to the database and will become the back-end for the future versions of Pontoon. We’d like to keep the development of the API use-case-driven. If you’re interested in creating a report or an extension which pulls data from Pontoon please let us know about your use-case! We’d like to prioritize the upcoming features to best serve the needs of the community. Refer to the L10n:Pontoon/API wikipage for more information about the planning process.

Do you speak Assamese, Interlingua, Lao, Latgalian, Maithili, Malayalam, Nepali, Tagalog? Mozilla needs your help

Oct 5 2017

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

No responses yet

Firefox 56 for desktop ships in 96 languages, with 5 more only available in the Nightly channel. To give you an idea of what this number represents, while getting the exact list of languages shipping in competitors is really hard, it’s roughly twice the number of languages shipping in Google Chrome, and over 3 times the number of localizations available in Apple Safari.

That’s possible thanks to the incredible work of our Community, since Firefox localizations are maintained by contributors, coordinated by a handful of employees (aka localization drivers).

Unfortunately, there comes a time in the life cycle of a localization when contributions stall: life gets in the way, priorities shift, and there’s no more time to dedicate to Mozilla and localization. As localization drivers, we usually try to identify new community owners, and facilitate the transition process, but that’s not always possible. In some cases, we need to remove a localization, because the amount of untranslated or mixed content reaches a point where the experience for users is simply not good enough.

There are currently 3 languages close to being removed:

They’re all available on Pontoon for translation: if you want to contribute to these localizations, please get in touch with us via our mailing list or #l10n o IRC. If you know people that might be interested, or you are part of the larger localization community, please share this message with your social contacts 😉

Five languages are currently available in Nightly, and they’d welcome help reaching completion or testing their builds:

All Nightly builds for these languages can be downloaded from this page. If you’re interested in helping, feel free to reach out to the respective teams.

L10n Report: September Edition

Sep 7 2017

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

Rodrigo Guerra and Carmelo Serraino started localizing Firefox in Interlingua. Get in touch if you’re interested in helping!

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.