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.
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 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.
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!
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 onreducing the performanceand memoryoverhead 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.
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 morelines 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.
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!
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?
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!
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)!
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.
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.
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
The Support site is getting closer to launching its visual refresh, which will include a few new strings in Pontoon.
Content for version 62 is live and ready for localization:
Read more about the “Top 20 Articles” sprint for several locales here.
Firefox Reality content has been added to the Knowledge Base, but there is no need to localize it for now.
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)!
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.
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:
Web part (through Pontoon)
Sentence collection
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.
intl_pluralrules is a Rust crate, built to handle pluralization. Pluralization is the foundation for all localization and many internationalization APIs. With the addition of intl_pluralrules, any locale-aware date-, time- or unit-formatting (“1 second” vs “2 seconds”) and many other pluralization-dependent APIs can be added to Rust.
Rust joins the family of mature languages such as C++ and Java (via ICU), JavaScript (via ECMA 402), and Python (via Babel) which make writing multilingual software possible. All of those APIs use the same unified database for storing international plural rules, called Unicode CLDR.
intl_pluralrules determines the CLDR plural category for numeric input by leveraging Unicode Language Plural Rules and plural rules from Unicode CLDR. That category can be used to identify the correct string variant that should be used in localization.
The crate is available on crates.io, and can be used as a library in any Rust program. For example, the Rust implementation of the Fluent Project is the first system using intl_pluralrules for handling pluralization.
Why care about plurals?
In short, numbers can change the way words appear in a string. In a simple example, the English words “page” and “pages” are different because of pluralization. English plural forms are fairly simple; in other languages, the rules can be more complex. If software is built with one plural paradigm in mind, localizing for several languages (each with its own unique paradigm) becomes a complicated process–and unnecessarily so.
Flod’s blog post on the advantages of Fluent describes the problems and potential benefits intl_pluralrules crate addresses in his section, Plural Forms. If you would like to know more about why crates like intl_pluralrules are vital to i18n and l10n in Rust, start with Flod’s post.
How intl_pluralrules does plurals
The intl_pluralrules crate accepts numeric input and produces the appropriate plural category for that input in a given locale. In completing this process, intl_pluralrules performs several steps outlined here:
Making plural operands from numbers
Unicode’s Language Plural Rules provides a defining set of characteristics that affect the plural category the number belongs to in certain languages. These characteristics are called operands. The set comprises an absolute value, integer value, fraction value with and without trailing zeros, and the number of fraction digits with and without trailing zeros.
The intl_pluralrules crate creates a set of operands from the input and uses those operands when determining the plural category.
Notice the difference between the v value (number of visible fraction digits) for 1 and 1.0. Although 1 and 1.0 represent the same literal value (both represent a singular value), the presence of a decimal can change the plural category in some languages.
For example, although in English it is unlikely to see whole count nouns measured in float style (with a trailing zero decimal), the correct plural form for 1.0 is “other”, not “one.” This means that the pages example from the previous section would read, “You have 1.0 open pages” rather than “You have 1.0 open page.” This distinction may seem strange because, as mentioned, this is an unusual use for 1.0 in English. Nonetheless, you will find that it is the proper plural form.
Because Rust’s float types do not preserve trailing zeros when stringified, the from method uses Rust’s ToString trait on its input when generating plural operands. This allows a user of the crate to send string or numeric input to the system, and, so long as it is a valid float or integer value, it will be accepted.
cldr_pluralrules_parser parses the plural rules from the JSON CLDR repository and builds an AST representation of the rules. The following code snippet shows the English and Russian plural rules from CLDR.
make_pluralrules generates a Rust file from that AST. The following code snippet shows the generated Rust plural logic for English.
The Rust file generated by these crates is used in intl_pluralrules to determine the plural form of a number.
A number needs to be passed to the select method on the IntlPluralRule instance created in step 1.
The value returned from step 2 is the plural category.
*You can use the get_locales method to see what languages are available in the crate
Performance and implications
First, intl_pluralrules has landed in fluent-rs, meaning that the Rust implementation uses the crate for handling all plural-concerned instances. Because intl_pluralrules leverages the available data from Unicode, Fluent’s selection process for plural-concerned strings in any FTL file is completely automated. So long as the provided CLDR file has rules for your locale, the developer will not need to hard code plural logic into the software and localizers won’t need to report a bug in order for the correct plural string to be activated.
Second, intl_pluralrules is fast. The crate is still in prerelease because, although fully functional, some optimization features are still being discussed. In spite of intl_pluralrules’ WIP status regarding optimization, the system is still incredibly performant. Compared to ICU’s C PluralRules, intl_pluralrules is approximately 20 times faster in a simple benchmark test.
Intl_pluralrules’ comparative speed is due to the decision to store plural rules as compiled Rust code, rather than as CLDR syntax to be parsed at runtime. Using cldr_pluralrules_parser and make_pluralrules to generate the Rust version of the CLDR rules, the plural rules are compiled into the crate. This makes the crate slightly larger but also quicker because CLDR rules are not parsed at run time (as they are in ICU), which is the main source of the speed disparity. As intl_pluralrules moves towards 1.0, it is expected that performance will only increase.
In the bigger picture, the release of intl_pluralrules means that the Rust ecosystem gains a higher-level internationalization and localization API, hopefully the first of several. Conversely, the internationalization and localization ecosystem gains use of this API, which leverages the performance benefits of the Rust Language.
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
Lots of new contributors joined us through the Common Voice project: Jimi (Danish) Fran (Icelandic), Kaz, (Japanese), Joshua (Kyrgyz), Niko (Komi-Zyrian), Sardana (Sakha), Bjartur (Faroese), Donald (Hong Kong), Gregor (Slovenian), Jack (Erzya), Kelly (Hakha Chin), and a few in the Korean team. Welcome to you all! You are the reasons that the Common Voice project is expanding in record pace in both the number of locales and the diversity of the contributors
We have new contributors helping to revive Afrikaans l10n. Welcome Jean, Stephan and Vincent!
Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!
New community/locales added
Erzya
Faroese
Hakha Chin
Komi-Zyrian
Kyrgyz
Sakha
Quechua Chanka
Aymara
K’iche’
New content and projects
What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop
Firefox 61 has been released on June 26th. This also means that Firefox 62 is in Beta, while 63 is on Nightly, and that’s where you should focus your work for localization and testing.
This development cycle will be a little longer than usual, to account for Summer holidays in the Northern hemisphere: the deadline to provide your localization for Beta is August 21st, with Firefox 62 planned for release on September 5th.That’s a Wednesday and not a Tuesday, which is the common release day for Mozilla products, because September 3rd is a public holiday in US (Labor Day).
Now, diving into updates and new content. There are several new in-product pages:
We talked about Shield Studies in the l10n report for May. about:studies is now available for localization.
Issues can occur when multiple instances of Firefox are open, and a pending update is applied to one of them. A new page, about:restartrequired, was created to inform the user that a restart is needed to avoid such problems.
Activity Stream is expanding beyond the New page. One of the directions is to experiment with a new, in-product first run experience, about:welcome, replacing the existing one based on web content served from mozilla.org.
One important note about Activity Stream (about:newtab and about:welcome): unlike other strings in Firefox, once translated they are not used directly in the following Nightly, they need a new build of Activity Stream (for now). That normally happens once a week. For this reason, if you’re targeting Beta, make sure to prioritize localization of activity-stream/newtab.properties.
What’s new or coming up in Test Pilot
Two new Test Pilot experiments were published on the website about 3 weeks ago: Color and Side View. While the experiments themselves were not localized, new content was added to the website. Unfortunately, that happened with poor timing, resulting in English content being displayed on the website. The following cycle is longer than usual (normally they are 2 weeks long), because most people were traveling for the bi-annual Mozilla All Hands, making things worse.
We realize that this is less than ideal, and we are trying to set up a system to avoid repeating these mistakes in the future.
What’s new or coming up in mobile
As mentioned in the section about Firefox desktop, Firefox 61 has been released on June 26th, which means that Firefox for Android 61 updates will start rolling out to users progressively. Please refer to the section about Firefox desktop above since the Firefox for Android release cycle is the same, and the comments concerning localization apply as well.
We’ve also recently decided to stop updating the What’s New content for Firefox Android (due to low visibility and interest in localizing this section, and the fact that it does not affect the number of downloads – amongst other things). This means the locales that were supported by the Play Store will no longer need to localize the updated version for Beta each time we are releasing a new version. Instead, we’ve opted for displaying a generic message.
On the Firefox iOS front, English from Canada (en-CA) was added to the ever-growing list of shipping locales with the new v12. Congratulations on that! Next update (and so, new strings) is slowly creeping up, so stay tuned for more.
Focus Android locales are also continuously growing, with Afrikaans (af), Pai-pai (pai), Punjabi (pa-IN), Quechua Chanka (quy) and Aymara (ay) teams having started to localize. Note that there are public Nightlies available on the Play Store that you can test your work on. Instructions on how to do that are here.
And finally, after months of silence localization-wise, Focus iOS will get new strings soon! However at the moment, we are not opening the project back up to new locales as there is no clearly defined schedule, and we cannot guarantee by when new locales can be added once completed.
What’s new or coming up in web projects
Legal documentation:
An FAQ page on privacy and data collection practice at Mozilla will be made available for localization for all languages. This will come soon.
There are twelve locales that are identified as priority locales based on Firefox desktop user size: de, es-ES, fr, it, id, ja, nl, pl, pt-BR, ru, tr, zh-CN. This means Privacy Notice for key legal documents will be supported and updated in these languages at an ongoing basis. The rest of the previously supported locales will remain available, but will be redirected to English for the latest updated versions.
The Privacy landing page is going through a makeover. The right side panel will be revised by archiving documentations for EOL products.
Common Voice:
We launched multi-language voice collection in German, French, and Welsh
Since the launch in May, we have started collecting in 7 more languages, for a total of 11 languages
The site is now live in 41 locales, with 16 more on the way
After the San Francisco All Hands, a whole new contribution portal would be launched soon
In the near future, we will roll out a new Homepage, and a brand new User Profile section (with stats and leaderboard), so we will need lots of help localizing this!
What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects
Copyright campaign! The battle to fix copyright has started a few days ago, and while we were disappointed by the JURI Committee vote, we’re now mobilizing citizens to ask a larger group of MEPs to reject Article 13 during the EU Parliament plenary on July 5th. We can still win!
In the second half of 2018, the Advocacy team will have a bigger focus on both Europe and company misbehavior around data, so we can expect more campaigns being localized. It’s also an opportunity to mobilize internal resources to plan and build localization support on the new foundation website.
If you would like to learn more, you can watch Jon Lloyd, Advocacy Campaigns Manager, during the Foundation All-Hands in Toronto talk briefly about the recent campaign wins and the strategy for the next 6 month:
On fundraising, the current plan for the coming month is to communicate an update to existing donors, do various testing around it, then send a broader fundraising ask towards end of July/beginning of August. The donate website will soon get a makeover that will fix some layout issues with currencies, and generally provide more space for localization. Which is good news!
Several foundation website will also soon get a unified navigation header to match the one on foundation.mozilla.org.
What’s new or coming up in Pontoon
Making unreviewed suggestions discoverable
Reviewing pending suggestions regularly is important and making them discoverable is the first step to get there. That’s why we got rid of the misleading Suggested count, which didn’t include suggestions to Translated strings, and started exposing Unreviewed suggestions in a new sortable column in dashboards. It’s represented by a lightbulb, which is painted blue if unreviewed suggestions are present.
Tags help you prioritize your work
To help you prioritize your work, we rolled out Tags. The idea is pretty simple: we define a set of tags with set priority, which are then assigned to translation resources (files). Effectively, that assigns priority to each string. Currently, tags are only enabled for Firefox, which you’ll notice by the Tags tab available in the Firefox localization dashboard and filters.
Pontoon Tools 3.2.0
Pontoon Tools is a must-have add-on for all Pontoon users, which allows you to stay up-to-date with localization activity even when you don’t use Pontoon. Michal Stanke just released a new version, which is now also available for Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. Additionally, it also brings support for the aforementioned Unreviewed state and enables system notifications by default.
Support for localizing WebExtensions
Extensions for Firefox are built using the WebExtensions API, a cross-browser system for developing extensions. The WebExtensions API has a rather handy module available for internationalizing extensions – i18n. It stores translations in messages.json files, which are now supported in Pontoon. For more technical details on internationalizing WebExtensions, see this MDN page.
Redesigning Pontoon homepage
As mentioned in the last month’s report, Pramit Singhi is working on Pontoon homepage redesign as part of the Google Summer of Code project. Based on the impressive amount of feedback collected during the research among Pontoon users, he came up with a proposal of the new homepage and would like to hear your thoughts. Please consider the proposal a wireframe, so he’s more interested in hearing what you think about the overall page structure and content and less so how you like fonts and colors.
Events
The French l10n team will be gathering in Paris at the end of July, to discuss many topics including improvements to the current localization and participation process to make it even more easy for newcomers, improvements to the team communication and do some training for the most recent team members. This event is part of our 2018 l10n community events, so don’t forget to start planning yours and make your request!
Indonesia (Jakarta): L10N-drivers are currently organizing a sprint with the local community, in order to add Javanese and Sundanese to Firefox Rocket shipping locales – and thus hopefully help expand our user base in Indonesia. Do you know anyone who would like to help localize in these two languages? Get in touch!
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
Francis who speaks many languages, joined the l10n community not long ago, thanks to the Common Voice project. He has been actively involved in bringing new contributors and introduce new localization communities to Mozilla. He also makes sure the new contributors have a simple onboarding process so they can contribute right away and see the fruit of their work quickly. Additionally, Francis files issues and fixes bugs through the project on GitHub. Thank you!
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)!
Last year we introduced a new review process in Pontoon with the ability to explicitly reject suggestions. That allowed us to accurately filter out suggestions in need of a review from approved and rejected ones. For more details, check out this blog post.
Today, we’re shipping the final piece of the puzzle to make unreviewed suggestions truly discoverable: we’re exposing them on dashboards. We’re also getting rid of the misleading Suggested count, which didn’t include suggestions to Translated strings. Suggested strings will be treated as Missing from now on – as they are in the product.
To make unreviewed suggestions stand out even more, we’re also introducing a new sortable column in dashboards. It’s represented by a lightbulb, which will be painted blue if unreviewed suggestions are present.
Unreviewed suggestions are represented by a lightbulb
A huge shout-out to Adrian Gaudebert, who contributed this important feature. Reviewing pending suggestions regularly is important and making them discoverable is the first step to get there.
While at Mozilla we want to ensure consistent and high-quality translations, we also want to make sure that contributing is a rewarding and pleasant experience for everyone. Translating in a timely manner is important, however there are other essential things to take into consideration. For example, leaving non-urgent projects with missing strings so that new localizers can get involved is one of them. Reviewing pending suggestions regularly is another – and the main topic of this post.
In the last few months, the l10n-drivers Project Management group (Delphine, Peiying, Flod, Jeff, and Théo) has taken a good look at the state of pending suggestions across teams and projects in Pontoon, and has decided to take more direct action in order to ensure that localizers (newcomers and old timers alike) get timely and constructive reviews. In fact, a lack of timely replies – or worst, a total lack of replies – creates an unwelcoming environment and risks losing contributors.
We started reaching out to some teams individually – but given the amount of locales concerned, it seems a broader “call to action” at this moment is a better way to kick things out.
As a first step, we’d like communities that have more than 300 pending suggestions to go through these and take some time to bring that number down. In fact, our goal this year is not only to get a better picture of the health of the localization communities, but also to take action in order to ensure our localization communities are thriving and healthy. This is just one of many steps to get there.
The reality is that when a locale has hundreds or thousands of unreviewed suggestions, and that remain unreviewed for months, it creates an unwelcoming environment for newcomers who could have a high impact on the project with some mentorship. Seeing these high numbers will make new potential localizers think that no one is paying attention, that they will not be able to get involved effectively and that they won’t be able to make an impact. In addition to being unwelcoming, this slowly creates a closed localization community, as the lack of reviews and transparency restrict involvement to only a handful of localizers (or in some cases, one localizer alone).
In the case of teams that have thousands of unreviewed strings, one way that they can start thinking about this is if there are any projects that have become less important, that they are less passionate about, and that they do not want to work on anymore. In this case, they can simply reach out to the Project Manager in charge in order to discuss the situation. The Project Manager can also easily be found on the Pontoon UI under each project page, next to the “Contact Person” field. If still in doubt, simply reach out to the dev-l10n mailing list and we will gladly respond from there.
So, what are our next steps here? Starting in July, we will reach out to teams that still have more than 300 pending suggestions and ask that they bring that number down. In lack of response, or if no action on pending suggestions is taken, we will carefully evaluate which contributors to give more permissions to and assign translator rights to new particularly active localizers. We will also talk with them on how to coordinate the localization activity for the locale.
So this is a call to action for every locale that has pending suggestions: please help us ensure that we all have a great experience in localization at Mozilla, by not only welcoming and onboarding newcomers in your team – but also making sure everyone gets a timely review of their work.
Pontoon documentation explains what a healthy localization workflow can look like, and we invite you to take a look at it here.
