Localizer Spotlight: Victor Ibragimov (Tajik locale)

Delphine

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Hello World!

My name is Victor Ibragimov, and I am from Dushanbe, Tajikistan (One of Five Central Asia Countries).

On September 3, 2023, I celebrate my third year as a member of the Mozilla community, starting from September 3, 2020!

Q. What first drew you to want to volunteer with Mozilla’s localization program?

I have been volunteering as a professional translator and coordinator of English to Tajik translations for over 20 years. Throughout my career, I have worked on numerous software localization projects, including Debian OS, Ubuntu OS, Fedora OS, openSuse OS, SailfishOS, KDE, Gnome Desktops, and many other fantastic software and platforms.

Around three years ago, I discovered that all these computer operating systems and desktops used Firefox web browser by default. However, I noticed that Firefox did not have Tajik language support. Determined to address this gap, I reached out to the maintainers of these projects. They informed me that Firefox is a separate project and advised me to contact the Mozilla team directly to initiate the localization of Tajik language.

With my extensive experience in translation and coordination, I was determined to contribute to the completion of a high-quality Tajik translation. This commitment was driven by my desire to enhance the usability of Mozilla products for Tajik-speaking users and to foster inclusion in the global tech community.

Q. What have been some of the most rewarding or impactful projects you’ve localized for Mozilla?

Some of the most rewarding and impactful projects I have localized for Mozilla include the translation of Firefox web browser into Tajik language.

Additionally, I have worked on localizing Mozilla’s mobile projects, such as Firefox for Android and Focus for Android. These projects have allowed Tajik-speaking users to have a seamless browsing experience on their mobile devices and maintain their privacy with the Focus app. This has had a positive impact on the accessibility of technology for Tajik-speaking individuals and has empowered them to fully utilize Mozilla’s mobile products.

Overall, these localization projects have been rewarding and impactful as they have contributed to breaking down language barriers, fostering inclusion, and empowering Tajik-speaking users to access and utilize Mozilla’s products effectively across various platforms.

Q. What advice would you give to someone new wanting to get involved in localizing for Mozilla?

1. Start by familiarizing yourself with the Mozilla community and the localization process. Visit the Mozilla website and explore the resources and documentation available for translators. Join relevant forums or mailing lists to connect with other translators and learn from their experiences.
2. Choose a project or software that you are passionate about and that aligns with your language expertise. It could be Firefox, Thunderbird, or any other Mozilla project. By working on something you are interested in, you will stay motivated and enjoy the process of localization.
3. Take advantage of the available tools and resources. Mozilla provides various tools and platforms to facilitate the localization process, such as Pontoon and Transvision. Familiarize yourself with these tools and use them to contribute effectively.
4. Collaborate and communicate with other translators. Localization is a collaborative effort, so it’s important to engage with other translators, ask questions, and seek feedback. Participate in discussions and share your knowledge and experiences with the community.
5. Be proactive and take initiative. Look for opportunities to contribute beyond just translating strings. Offer to review translations, suggest improvements, or help with testing and bug reporting. This will not only enhance your skills but also make you a valuable member of the localization team.
6. Stay updated with the latest developments in your language and the software you are localizing. Attend conferences, workshops, or webinars related to localization or technology to stay informed about new trends and best practices.
7. Seek feedback and continuously improve your translations. Localization is an ongoing process, and there is always room for improvement. Actively seek feedback from users, fellow translators, and project maintainers to refine your translations and ensure they are accurate, clear, and culturally appropriate. Embrace feedback as an opportunity for growth and strive to deliver high-quality localized content.
8. Stay connected with the Mozilla community and stay up to date with changes and updates. Join relevant mailing lists or forums to stay informed about new projects, updates, and announcements. Regularly check the Mozilla website and other official channels for any news or changes that may impact your localization work. By staying connected, you can actively contribute to the community and ensure your translations are up to date with the latest developments.
9. Be patient and persistent. Localization can be challenging at times, especially when dealing with technical terms or complex strings. Don’t get discouraged if you face difficulties initially. Keep practicing, learning, and improving your skills.
10. Lastly, enjoy the process and have fun! Localizing for Mozilla is not just about contributing to a global project, but also about preserving and promoting your language globally. Embrace the opportunity to make a positive impact and connect with your language community.

Remember, whether you are a newcomer or an experienced translator, your contribution to localizing Mozilla projects can have a significant impact. So, take the leap and start making a difference in your language community and beyond.

Q. How has your volunteering impacted users in your language community?

As a Mozilla volunteer, my contributions to Tajik translation have had a significant impact on Mozilla users in the Tajik language community. By ensuring that Firefox web browser is fully localized and accessible in Tajik, I have helped to make it easier for Tajik internet users to navigate and use the browser in their native language. This has not only improved their overall browsing experience but also promoted the importance of using Tajik as a language of technology and digital communication.

Furthermore, by incorporating the new Tajik language reforms into translations, I have played a role in making the Tajik language clearer and more beautiful. This has not only enhanced the user experience for Tajik-speaking Mozilla users but has also contributed to the development and preservation of the language itself.

In addition, my involvement in creating new Internet terminology for the Tajik language has been instrumental in bridging the linguistic gap between technology and the Tajik-speaking community. This has allowed for the development of e-government, e-commerce, and e-education platforms in Tajikistan, as well as empowering Tajik internet users to fully utilize the potential of the internet in their daily lives.

Moreover, the opportunity to create multilingual dictionaries with Tajik language has further enriched the linguistic resources available to Tajik speakers. This has not only facilitated effective communication but has also fostered a sense of pride and ownership over their language.

Interested in featuring in these spotlights? Or know someone you think we should interview? Reach out to delphine at mozilla dot com. Interested in contributing to localization? Head on over here for more details!

Useful Links

L10n Report: July 2023 Edition

Peiying Mo

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Welcome!

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

Deep dive: Firefox release schedule

If you’re new to Mozilla products, Firefox release schedule can be overwhelming. While whattrainisitnow.com is a useful resource to understand what’s shipping and when, let’s focus on the information that is relevant for localization:

  • Nightly should be your main focus as a localizer. New strings are exposed once or twice a week, the build is updated frequently (twice a day), so you can localize and test quickly before your translations are exposed to a larger audience with Beta and Release.
  • For Beta, we will automatically include updated translations up to the last week of the cycle (a cycle is usually 4 weeks long, but can occasionally be longer to accommodate for public holidays and other exceptions). The last week of the Beta cycle is “release candidate week” (RC week), and only urgent code fixes are accepted to avoid introducing new issues. The deadline you see in Pontoon is placed on the Sunday before RC week: that represents the last day to update translations and make sure they will be included in the actual RC build, which will then become Release a week later.
  • We normally don’t update translations in Firefox release, but it can be done manually in case of significant issues.

There is also another version of Firefox, called Extended Support Release (ESR): this version is targeted at users that don’t like frequent changes and updates, and it’s supported for about 9 months. The old and new ESR versions will overlap for a few weeks to guarantee a smooth transition, especially for enterprises with many installations.

Translations are not updated automatically for ESR after we ship the first build, but we normally update them 2-3 times during the ESR lifetime, to improve completion levels and include localization improvements. For example, 115.2 (the third build for ESR 115) will include a first localization update compared to the initial 115 release.

We try to hide all this complexity when it comes to localizing Firefox: you will only find one project in Pontoon, and that includes strings for all supported versions. Recently, we dropped support for the previous ESR version – Firefox ESR 102, which will stop receiving updates in September — which means all the strings used only in that version have been removed from Pontoon (about 1400 strings, including hundreds of legacy DTD strings).

New content

The amount of new content has been relatively small over the last months:

  • A new version of about:firefoxview is in the works. We will soon reach out through Pontoon notifications with more details and testing instructions.
  • There is a new feature to limit the execution of extensions on sites identified by Mozilla (called restricted sites). The goal is to protect users from known malicious actors, while still giving them the choice to manually allow extensions they trust.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Things have been very quiet out in mobile land, and there is not much to report in this edition.

As the v116 l10n cycle comes to an end, string freeze for v117 is upon us and strings will be exposed within the next few days. There should be no additional strings landing for Firefox for iOS at this point.

On Android, we will be giving users the option to add a custom search engine URL.

Stay tuned for more updates in the next edition!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org

The site will go through some changes throughout the rest of the year and to the next. The changes considered low hanging fruit will be made first, this includes the Home page. The new Home page will ensure all the locales will have the same look and feel.

Also, by the end of the month, some of the Relay Website content will be migrated to the mozilla.org site. For the communities that have been localizing the Relay Website project, the migration includes new content as well as existing localized content from Firefox Relay Website. Initially this content will only be available in the development environment, but strings will be visible in Pontoon once the migration is complete. If your locale is not enabled for the Relay project in Pontoon, you will see a lot of new content as a result. We will make an announcement after the migration has completed, please take some time to review the pages and ensure any minor glitches are identified and fixed.

Firefox Relay Website

The Relay Premium feature will be made available to more EU markets in a few weeks. These new markets include: Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania. Slovakia, Slovenia and more.

This launch requires the localization of the Firefox Relay Website and Firefox Accounts in order to have a good user experience. If Relay is not enabled by the community in Pontoon, the product will be offered in English. If the Firefox Accounts is opted in by the community in Pontoon, but the completion is under 70%, the payment portion of the user flow will fall back to English but in the corresponding currency for the local. It’s never too late to enable the products if your locale has not. If it is enabled for both but the projects are falling behind, please give them higher priority and make time to catch up. Thank you!

Newly published localizer facing documentation

We recently completed a comprehensive update of our Pontoon documentation for localizers. This new documentation should accurately reflect the Pontoon environment as you see it today, with handy details on things like how to make the most of tools in your translation workspace, how to use search filters to find the strings you need efficiently, and everything you need to know on how to translate in Pontoon. Check it out!

If you spot any mistakes, have ideas to make the documentation better, or would otherwise like to contribute to our localizer documentation, visit our GitHub repository and check out the README for information on how to contribute.

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

  • Victor is a passionate localizer, who has been spearheading the Mozilla mission in Tajikistan for quite a few years now. He is involved on many fronts, including digital literacy trainings in Tajikistan to introduce Firefox in the Tajik language and promoting it as the number one browser in the country. He also collaborates with marketplaces, to connect them with local farmers without intermediaries. He uses local opportunities to promote safer internet browsing and showcased the potential of Firefox in Tajik in that context. Victor is also heavily involved in a US embassy funded project aimed to enhance internet access and safety for leaders and their communities in Tajikistan, with a focus on independent media, countering violent extremism, women’s economic empowerment, environmental awareness, and more. The project also emphasizes the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in its implementation. Thank you Victor for helping the internet to stay safe, open and accessible to all!

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact us and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve it.

Pretranslation in Pontoon: Beta Testing Results and Next Steps

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

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The amount of content to translate for Mozilla projects is constantly growing, with overlapping and often demanding deadlines. We want to support our community of volunteers by making their life easier, in particular when it comes to using translations that have already been reviewed and approved before, but also by bootstrapping translation for brand-new content.

As part of this effort, over 3 years ago we started working on the foundation layers to support pretranslation in Pontoon, and we’re almost ready to open this feature up to all supported locales.

Before we dive in, what is pretranslation, and how does it work? If pretranslation is enabled for a combination of locale and project, when a new string is added in Pontoon:

  • It will be translated (pretranslated) using a 100% match from translation memory or, should that not be available, using the Google AutoML Translation engine with a custom model.
  • The string will be stored in Pontoon with a special “pretranslated” status. The pretranslated status shows up in dashboards, and can be used in filters within the translation interface.
  • The string will also be saved in the repository (e.g. GitHub, and eventually ship in the product.

Pretranslation can be enabled for a subset of locales in any project, and the list of locales can differ between projects.

You might be asking why Google AutoML Translation and not another service. We selected this provider based on several criteria, including reliability, quality of results, and range of supported locales. In terms of features, Google AutoML Translation also allows us to fine tune the translation engine by training it on our own existing translation memories, which increases the chances to match the existing style and terminology.

Alpha Testing

To start, we tested pretranslation with only 2 locales — Italian and Slovenian — between December 2022 and March 2023. We picked these locales because we had staff support to review translations, and fixed several bugs in the process.

As part of this phase, we tested pretranslation on 6 different projects (Firefox accounts, Firefox for iOS, Thunderbird, Firefox Monitor, Mozilla VPN Client, Focus for Android), to cover different file formats (GNU gettext, Fluent, XLIFF, Android XML), for a total of 1318 strings.

The results*, especially when accounting for the bugs we fixed over time, were above our initial expectations:

  • 65.10% pretranslated strings were approved without changes.
  • 94.61% were manually reviewed as “usable”.

For the manual review, we assigned a score between 1 and 3 to the rejected pretranslations:

  • 1: Translation is unusable, either because it can’t be understood, or it misleads the user.
  • 2: Translation is somehow understandable, but should be improved.
  • 3: Translation is good, only needs a minor tweak.

A score of 2 or 3 classifies the rejected pretranslation as “usable”.

The average chF++ score — the algorithm we are using to automatically evaluate translations — was 92.97 (the closer to 100, the better).

The full data from our Alpha testing is available in this spreadsheet.

* The results for the Alpha testing that we published previously, for example in our May l10n report, were calculated incorrectly. The issue was identified and fixed during the Beta phase.

Beta Testing

For the next phase, we planned to expand our testing to Mozilla’s locales with most users (French, German), and add 3 more locales willing to volunteer. We sent a call for locales to opt in at the end of February, and ended up accepting 5 more locales.

Our Beta testing ran between April 1st and June 30th, with:

  • 9 locales: Welsh (cy), German (de), Spanish from Argentina (es-AR), French (fr), Hungarian (hu), Indonesian (id), Italian (it), Slovenian (sl), Traditional Chinese (zh-TW).
  • 11 projects: AMO Linter, Firefox accounts, Firefox for Android, Firefox for iOS, Firefox Monitor, Firefox Relay (website + add-on), Focus for Android, Mozilla VPN Client, mozilla.org, Thunderbird.

Results

Over 3 months, localizers reviewed 3211 pretranslated strings:

  • The average approval rate was 61.10%. The lowest locale had an approval rate of 41.85% (zh-TW), while the highest had 84.29% (de).
  • The average review time was about 8 days. Excluding the slowest locale, the average for the remaining 8 locales was 2.5 days, which is an impressive result.

The project with the worst performance was AMO Linter (enabled as a test for Italian), due to the nature of the source content (inconsistencies in terminology and typography, in general developer-focused content difficult to translate). This highlights the impact of the proactive review work that the Localization Team does on projects before content gets exposed for localization in Pontoon, and how that can positively impact pretranslation results.

Mozilla.org also performed below average (average approval at 39.52%), but the data might be skewed by the fact that only 4 locales were enabled, and 3 were the locales with the lowest overall approval rate. On the other hand, projects with short strings (like mobile projects) seemed to perform overall better (approval between 65% and 81%), possibly thanks to a higher number of perfect matches with translation memory.

Out of the 963 rejected strings, 80.89% were marked as “usable” when manually reviewed by localizers. Both Italian (+11.67%) and Slovenian (+11.15%) performed better in Beta than Alpha for this metric, proving the impact of the code improvements made during Beta.

Graph showing results of manual evaluation during the Beta phaseThe full data from our Beta testing is available in this spreadsheet, while manual evaluation is available here.

Survey

We also ran a survey to ask all localizers involved how they felt about the feature. These were the main takeaways:

  • 91.7% of participants found the feature helpful and would like to use it for more projects.
  • 90.9% think we should use pretranslation to bootstrap new projects.
  • 63.6% think we should enable pretranslation by default.

Full analysis of the survey results is available here.

Acknowledgements and Next Steps

While this has proven to be a complex feature to implement — and there’s still space for improvement, in particular when it comes to more complex Fluent strings, or evaluating alternative machine translation engines, starting with our own Firefox Translations — it’s important to acknowledge, once again, the fundamental role played by our community. Without their support and their responsiveness during Beta testing, we wouldn’t be able to move forward with the same level of confidence.

What are the next steps? In the coming weeks, we are going to implement an opt-in form in Pontoon, so that locales can request to enable pretranslation directly (see specs here). We’ll make sure to announce it via Discourse and Pontoon notifications as soon as the form is available. We’re also going to add continuous monitoring, showing pretranslation statistics in the Insights dashboards for locales and projects.

Opt-in Guidelines

These are to be considered guidelines more than strict criteria: members of staff will evaluate each request to opt in individually, based on their knowledge of the project and direct experience with the locale.

Criteria for enabling pretranslation for a new locale

  • Request needs to come from translators or managers active within the last month (translating or reviewing).
  • There is an active manager for the locale (last activity within 2 months).

Criteria for enabling pretranslation for a new project

  • Less than 400 missing strings, except for projects or locales where existing pretranslation statistics provide high-confidence.
  • Average review time for pretranslations in existing projects is faster than 3 weeks.

Criteria for disabling the feature for a locale or a project

  • Approval rate drops below 40%.
  • Average review time for pretranslations is slower than 6 weeks.

Note that disabling a project would always involve a conversation with reviewers for the locale.

L10n Report: May 2023 Edition

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

2 responses

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

Welcome!

New localizers

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

We also want to welcome Ayanaa Rahman to the localization team. She’s joining us for an internship as a backend software engineer, and you’ll see her active primarily around Pontoon. Here’s a few words from her:

Hi all, I’m Ayanaa Rahman. I recently completed my third year studying Computer Science at the University of Toronto. I have also worked at financial institutions in both the US & Canada as a Software Developer intern, focusing on automation and big data.

Born into an immigrant family and raised in the multicultural city of Toronto, I’ve been exposed to multiple languages and cultures throughout my life. This experience has highlighted the importance of effective communication across different languages, particularly to enhance people’s digital experiences. I am eager to leverage my background and skills to make a meaningful contribution to the Mozilla community.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Firefox 113, shipping to release users on May 9, is going to include a new locale: Tajik (tg). Huge thanks to Victor Ibragimov, the locale manager, and all other community members for achieving such an impressive result. Victor has been amazing over the last months, both online and offline, in finding resources and promoting the Tajik language.

In terms of new features, developers are currently working on the workflow to import data from other browsers, and we expect an overall increase in the number of strings around messaging and onboarding. Keep an eye out on notifications in Pontoon for updated testing instructions.

Fonts and fingerprinting

Firefox developers are working on reducing the ability for websites to track users based on their browser “fingerprint”, and fonts are one of the characteristics that bad actors can use to uniquely identify your browser.

By restricting access to only fonts pre-installed with the operating system, this form of fingerprinting becomes much less effective. The challenge is that it could impair the experience for users that access content in other languages, as they might rely on fonts installed through other systems (e.g. OS language packs).

Given how large the number of possible scenarios is, the team working on this feature needs help from the localization community to ensure user experience is not degraded. This document contains detailed information about the feature, how to test it and how to report errors.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Things have been moving quite a bit in mobile land since our last report in January – especially with the past couple of versions leading up to the next v114 (in Nightly right now) – which all feature some notable updates.

A reminder that the last day to get translations in for version 114 is May 28 (all strings for this version should have landed by May 5th approximately).

One thing you may have noticed are the experiments going on these days both in Firefox desktop and mobile (often labeled as “Nimbus” in localization comments and string IDs). For mobile, we have been playing around with onboarding cards, as we suggest new users to change their default mobile browsers to Firefox.

Other notable updates are:

  • Users can now choose whether to be asked every time they open a link that would open in another app
  • Websites that use window.print() can now be printed in Firefox for Android
  • Improvements to Credit Card Autofill
  • Cookie Banner Reduction/Blocking: this new feature aims at providing users a seamless browsing experience by drastically minimizing cookie banner annoyance while also delivering the most private and secure option to handling the cookie banners

Now on to some community highlights: on mobile, Tajik (tg) has recently shipped at 100% complete translation on Focus for Android browser, making it the third browser available to Tajik speakers: Firefox for desktop, Firefox for Android, and now Focus for Android. As mentioned previously in this newsletter, congratulations to Victor and his team for sustaining this work – and the community – across the board! We look forward to the local initiatives taking place in Tajikistan in the near future, expanding the open, free and accessible internet in the region.

Amharic (am) has also recently shipped entirely localized versions of Firefox for Android, Focus for Android and Focus for iOS. Congratulations to the team who has worked relentlessly on keeping these projects up to date as well as growing the community.

Sardinian (sc) also recently initiated and completed Firefox for Android localization, as an ongoing effort in their existing projects. And Persian (fa) locale has been ramping up with projects thanks to locale manager Reza and fellow translator MSKF.

We want to take the opportunity to remind folks that Firefox for Android has an in-app language switcher, which works independently from the native Android OS language options. It generally supports a larger set of languages than the Android system language settings does. Head over to your Firefox for Android “Settings > Language” to discover 100+ languages available. (Taking the opportunity to note that a language switcher also exists within the Mozilla VPN settings, which seems to be a feature overlooked by many).

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Relay Website

As you may have noticed, the app.ftl file is no longer in Pontoon. In place are multiple, feature oriented files. The goal is to make each file more modular so it gives more context where strings land in the product. And it also offers flexibility to provide regional specific strings. There will be a few more of these efforts in the future. If the strings were localized prior to the migration, they are already moved to the new file, including contribution history. No need to go in to retranslate them. If there are untranslated strings, they are brand new strings.

Mozilla.org

This is a heads-up. A few pages from the Relay Website project will be migrated to mozilla.org. Pages to be migrated include faq.ftl and landing.ftl. Like the previous migrations, the Pontoon team will do their best to preserve the work you did, including attributes to each of the localized strings,  approved or pending for review.  For locales that have not localized the Relay product, you will see an increase in untranslated strings. You can prioritize these sets of files against others.

The migration is scheduled to be complete before the next l10n report. The purpose of this migration is for better search ranking. A link to the Relay pages will be added to the navigation bar.

Firefox Accounts

The Firefox accounts team are undergoing work to improve the user experience around account authentication and data recovery. Some changes are already in progress, and going forward you should see more strings related to two factor authentication, account recovery, password resets, and more. Many of these changes can be viewed before changes go to staging or production by checking Storybooks which can show English strings in context. The link to Storybooks can be found under the resources section of Firefox Accounts within Pontoon.

What’s new or coming up in SUMO

  • Check out the SUMO Sprint wikipage for Firefox 113 to learn more about how you can help with this release.
  • Watch the recording of our community call in March if you haven’t already to learn more about SUI (Simplified User Interface) screenshot that Lucas shared.
  • It’s also highly recommended to watch our community call in April to catch up on the result of the contributor survey we’ve done in Q1.
  • If you’re a Social Support or Mobile Store Support contributor, make sure to watch the contributor forum to get updates about queue stats every week. Kiki will post the update by the end of the week to make sure that you’re updated. Here’s the latest one from last week.
  • You can now learn more about Kitsune releases by following this Discourse topic.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Pretranslation

We have successfully completed the Alpha testing phase of the Pretranslation feature with the Italian and Slovenian locale. The results[1], especially when accounting for the bugs fixed during the testing period, were quite promising:

  • 65.10% pretranslated strings were approved without changes.
  • 94.61% were manually reviewed as “usable”.
  • The average chrF++ score was 92.97

Between April and June 2023, Pontoon Pretranslation feature will be in the Beta testing phase with a total of 9 participating locales. In case of a success, we expect to make the feature available to more locales soon after. Stay tuned!

[1] Data has been revised after this post was first published. During the Beta testing we discovered an error in the way data was calculated, and applied the same fixes to the data collected during Alpha testing.

New contributions

Thanks to our army of awesome contributors for recent improvements to our codebase:

  • Willian, who joined the project last year, landed 10 additional patches(!) recently, including making the All contributions view the new default view on the Profile page.
  • Ivan added support for reading project configurations from the repository. (Ivan, sorry it took forever to review it!)
  • Uriel added support for implicit TLS emails.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

We have neglected our Pontoon documentation for a long time, and unfortunately it shows. We’re actively working on updating it, and we plan to wrap this project by the end of June.

Events

Localization “Fireside Chat”: come join us on Wednesday May 10, at 9am PT, where we will answer any questions you may have concerning updates contained in this localization report. This is the first time the localization-drivers try out this type of event, and we will accommodate for more timezones in the next iteration. It will take place on AirMozilla, and is open to anyone interested.

In the meantime you can check out our blog and visit past reports here.

Stay tuned on Discourse or in our Matrix channel for more info coming out soon!

Start asking questions here (or in this pad). You can also drop questions in the comments section of this blog post. Note that during the event, you will be able to ask more questions on our Matrix channel, and we will address them live if time permits.

Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Contact us and we’ll include it.

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

  • Thanks to all locale managers and translators who are helping us to test the Pretranslation feature in Pontoon. The locales currently involved are: cy, de, es-AR, fr, hu, id, it, sl, zh-TW. Your help, on top of what you’re doing every day to support Mozilla, is very much appreciated.
  • Kudos to Aderajew and Bantegize who single-handedly revived the Amharic community in a span of a few months! They completed the localization of a few mobile projects, and are making progress weekly on the mozilla.org project. Between the two of them, they split the tasks of what they each do best: localizing the products but also looking for new contributors, building up the community. Way to go!
  • Parvez and Abass led the effort in completing several high priority projects for Saraiki, including Firefox desktop, mobile products for Android, and mozilla.org.

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact us and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

 

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve it.

L10n Report: January 2023 Edition

Bryan Olsson

No responses yet

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

Welcome!

New localizers

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

New community/locales added

  • Punjabi from Pakistan (pa-pk) was recently added to Pontoon.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Firefox 111, shipping to release users on March 14, is going to include two new locales: Friulian (fur) and Sardinian (sc). Congratulations to the team for this achievement, it’s been a long time since we added new locales to release (Firefox 91).

A new locale is also available in Nightly, Saraiki (skr). Unfortunately, it’s currently blocked by missing information in the Unicode (CLDR) database that prevents the layout from being correctly displayed with right-to-left direction. If you want to help them, feel free to reach out to the locale manager.

In terms of content, one major feature coming is Cookie Banner Reduction, which will allow users to automatically reject all cookies in cookie banner requests. Several strings already landed over the last weeks, but expect some changes and instructions on how to test the feature (and different variations of messages used for testing).

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Just as for Firefox desktop, the v111 release ships on March 14 for all mobile projects, and also contains strings for the new Cookie Banner Reduction feature (see section above). Stay tuned for more information around that.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org

The site is going to go through some transformation this year. It involves restructuring such as removing pages with duplicate information, consolidating other pages, redesigning the site, and rewriting some copy. Having said that, the effort involves several cross functional teams to accomplish. Impact of these changes on localization is estimated to be in the second half of the year.

If your locales have some catching up to do, please continue working. Your work won’t go wasted as it will be stored in the translation memory in Pontoon. Speaking of such, congratulations to the Saraiki (skr) team for completing the project. The site was recently launched on production.

AMO

Strings related to tools for reviewer and admins have been removed from Pontoon. The features used to be available for vetted contributors plus Mozilla staff and contractors in the production environment, but now it’s no longer the case. Since the localized strings can’t be reviewed in context by localizers, the team has decided to separate the strings from landing in Pontoon. Currently the feature is partially localized if your locale has done some or all the work in the past.

Firefox Accounts

Behind the scenes, the Firefox Accounts team are in the process of refactoring a number of pages to use Fluent. This means we will see a number of strings reusing translations from older file formats with updated Fluent syntax. These strings are in the process of landing, but won’t be exposed until the rework is done, so it may be some time before strings can be reviewed in production.

Congratulations to Baurzhan of the Kazakh (kk) team for recently raising the completion rate of his locale from 30% to 100%. The Kazakh locale is already activated on staging and will soon be released to production.

What’s new or coming up in SUMO

  • What did SUMO accomplish in 2022? Check out our 2022 summary in this blog post.
  • Please join our discussion on how we would like to present ourselves in Mozilla.Social!
  • SUMO just redesigned our Contribute Page recently. Check out the news and the new page if you haven’t already!
  • The Android mobile team (Firefox for Android and Firefox Focus for Android) have decided to move to Bugzilla. If you’re a mobile contributor, make sure to direct users to the right place for bug report by referring them to this article.
  • Check out the SUMO Sprint for Firefox 109 to learn more about how you can help with this release.
  • Are you a KB or article localization contributor and experience issue with special characters when copying tags? Please chime in on the discussion thread or directly in the bug report (Thanks to Tim for filing that bug).
  • If you’re a Social Support or Mobile Store Support contributor, make sure to watch the contributor forum to get updates about queue stats every week. Kiki will post the update by the end of the week to make sure that you’re updated. Here’s the latest one from last week.

You can now learn more about Kitsune releases by following this Discourse topic.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Changes to the Editor

Pontoon’s editor is undergoing improvements, thanks to some deeper data model changes. The “rich” editor is now able to work with messages with multiple selectors, with further improvements incoming as this work progresses.

As with all other aspects of Pontoon, please let us know if you’ve any comments on these changes as they are deployed.

Pretranslation

We started evaluating the Pretranslation feature on pontoon.mozilla.org. Testing is currently limited to 2 locales, but we’ll start adding more when we reach the satisfactory level of quality and stability.

New contributions

Thanks to our army of awesome contributors for recent improvements to our codebase:

  • Willian made his first contributions to Pontoon, including upgrading our legacy jQuery library.
  • Tomás fixed a bug in the local setup, which was also his first contribution.
  • Vishal fixed several bugs in the Pretranslation feature, which he developed a while ago.

Events

Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Contact us and we’ll include it.

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact us and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve it.

L10n Report: October 2022 Edition

Amir Habibi

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!

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

First of all, thanks to all localizers who contributed to a successful MR release (106) for Firefox desktop. While the new content wasn’t as large as previous major releases, it was definitely challenging, with new feature names added for the first time in a long time.

What’s next? We expect a period of stabilization, with bug fixes that will require new strings, followed by a low volume of new content. We’ll make sure to keep an eye out for the next major release in 2023, and provide as much context as possible for both translation and testing.

Now more than ever it’s a good time to make sure you’re following the Bugzilla component for your locale, testing Nightly builds, and keeping an eye out for potential feedback on social media.

One other update is that we have made significant progress in removing legacy formats from Firefox:

  • All DTD strings have been removed and migrated to Fluent. Given the nature of our infrastructure — we need to support all shipping versions including ESR — the strings will remain available in Pontoon until late Summer 2023, when Firefox ESR 102 will become obsolete. In the meantime, all these files have been marked as low priority in Pontoon (see for example Italian, tag “Legacy DTD strings (ESR 102)”).
  • We have started migrating some plural strings from .properties to Fluent. We are aware that plural forms in .properties were confusing, using a semicolon as separator and only a comment to distinguish them from standard strings. For this reason, we’ll also try to prevent developers from adding new plural strings using this format.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

We have recently launched our Major Release on both Mobile and Desktop! This was v106 release. Thank you to all localizers who have worked hard on this global launch. There were more than 274 folks working on this, and (approximately) 67,094 translations!

Thank you!

Here are the main MR features on mobile:

  • New wallpapers
  • Recently synced tabs will now appear in the “Jump Back” section of your home page
  • Users will see CFR (UI popups) pointing to the new MR features. Existing users updating to 106 should also see new onboarding screens introducing the MR features

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Firefox Relay Website

A bunch of strings were added as the result of a new feature that’s only available in Canada and the US at the moment. Locale specific files were created. This is the first time a product team targets non-English users as well as English users in both countries with a new feature.  Since we don’t have Canadian French and US Spanish communities, these pages were assigned to the French and Mexican Spanish communities respectively. Please give these pages higher priority as they are time sensitive and there is a promotion going on. The promotion encourages users to sign up for both Firefox Relay and Mozilla VPN as a bundle at a discounted price. Thanks to both communities for helping out.

There will be promotional strings added to the Firefox Relay Add-on project. The strings are available for all locales to localize but the promotion is only visible for users in the US and Canada.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Pontoon profile pages have a brand new look: check out this blog post for more information about this change, and don’t forget to update your profile with relevant contact information, to help both project managers and fellow localizers get in touch if needed.

Events

Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Contact us and we’ll include it.

Friends of the Lion

 

Image by Elio Qoshi

 

 

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact us and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out!

 

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve it.

Redesigned profile page now available in Pontoon

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

No responses yet

Back in February 2022, we reached out to our community to ask for feedback on a proposal to completely rethink the profile page in Pontoon.

The goal was to improve the experience for everyone on the platform, transforming this page into an effective tool that could showcase contributions, provide useful contact information, and help locale managers to grow their communities.

As a reminder, these were the user stories that we defined to help us guide the design process.

As a contributor, I want to be able to:

  • Quickly see how much I contribute over time to localization.
  • Share my profile with potential employers in the localization industry, or use it to demonstrate my involvement in projects as a volunteer.
  • Control visibility of personal information displayed in my profile.
  • See data about the quality of my contributions and use it to make a case for promotion with locale managers or administrators.
  • See when my own suggestions have been reviewed and access them.

As a translator, I want to be able to:

  • See if a person has usually been providing good quality translations.
  • Check if the person has specific permissions for my own locale, potentially for other locales.

As a locale manager, I want to be able to:

  • See the quality of contributions provided by a specific person.
  • See how frequently a person contributes translations, and the amount of their contributions.

As an administrator (or project manager), I want to be able to:

  • See data about the user:
    • When they signed up.
    • When was the last time they logged in to Pontoon, or they were active on the platform.
    • Quickly assess the frequency of contributions by type (reviews performed, translations).
    • Which projects and locales they contributed to.
    • Get a sense of the quality and amount of their contribution.
  • Easily access contributions by a specific person.

We’re happy to announce that the vast majority of the work has been completed, and you can already see it online in Pontoon. You can click on your profile icon in the top right corner, then click again on the name/icon in the dropdown to display your personal profile page (or you can see an example here).

Pontoon New Profile

In the left column, you can find information about the user: contact details, roles, as well as last known activity.

Each user can customize this information in the updated Settings page (click the CHANGE SETTINGS button to access it), where it’s possible to enter data as well as determine the visibility of some of the fields.

In the top central section there are two new graphs:

  • Approval rate shows the ratio between the number of translations approved and the total number of translations reviewed, excluding self-approved translations.
  • Self-approval rate is only visible for users with translator rights, and shows the ratio between the number of translations submitted directly — or self-approved after submitting them as suggestions — and the total number of translations approved.

Right below these graphs, there is a section showing a graphical representation of the user’s activity in the last year:

  • Each square represents a day, while each row represents a day of the week. The lighter the color, the higher the number of contributions on that day.
  • By default, the chart will show data for Submissions and reviews, which means translations submitted and reviews performed. We decided to use this as default among all the options, since it actually shows actions that require an active role from the user.
  • The chart will display activity for the last year, while the activity log below will by default display activity in more detail for the last month. Clicking on a specific square (day) will only show the activity for that day.

It’s important to note that the activity log includes links that allow you to jump to those specific strings in the translation editor, and that includes reviews performed or received, for which a new filter has been implemented.

We hope that you’ll find this new profile page useful in your day to day contributions to Mozilla. If you encounter any problems, don’t hesitate to file an issue on GitHub.

 

L10n Report: July 2022 Edition

Matjaž Horvat

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!

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

While the last months have been pretty quiet in terms of new content for Firefox, we’re approaching a new major release for 2022, and that will include new features and dedicated onboarding.

Part of the content has already started landing in the last days, expect more in the coming weeks. In the meantime, make sure to check out the feature name guidelines for Firefox View and Colorways.

In terms of upcoming deadlines: Firefox 104 is currently in Beta and it will be possible to update translations up to August 14.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Mobile releases now align more closely to desktop release schedules, so you may notice that target dates for these projects are the same in Pontoon. As with desktop, things are quiet now for mobile, but we’ll be seeing more strings landing in the coming weeks for the next major release.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Firefox Relay website & add-on

We’re expanding Firefox Relay Premium into new locales across Europe: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. In order to deliver a truly great experience to our users in these new locales, we would like to make sure that users can utilize our products in the language they feel most comfortable with. Having these languages localized will take already complex topics like privacy and security and help connect more with users and offer them greater protections.

If you don’t see the product offered in the language in the markets above, maybe you can help by requesting to localize the product. Thank you for helping spread the word.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

  • When 100% TM match is available, it now automatically appears in the editor if the string doesn’t have any translations yet.

    100% matches from Translation Memory now automatically appear in the editor

  • Before new users make their first contribution to a locale, they are now provided with guidelines. And when they submit their first suggestion, team managers get notified.

    Tooltip with guidelines for new contributors.

  • The Contributors page on the Team dashboard has been reorganized. Contributors are grouped by their role within the team, which makes it easier to identify and reach out to team managers.

    Team contributors grouped by role.

  • We have introduced a new list parameter in translate view URLs, which allows for presenting a selected list of strings in the sidebar.
  • Deadlines have been renamed to Target Dates.
  • Thanks to Eemeli for making a bunch of under-the-hood improvements, which make our codebase much easier to build on.

Events

Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Contact us and we’ll include it.

Friends of the Lion

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact us and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve it.

Introducing Pretranslation in Pontoon

Matjaž Horvat

No responses yet

In the coming months we’ll begin rolling out the Pretranslation feature in Pontoon.

Pretranslation is the process of using translation memory and machine translation systems to translate content before it is edited by translators. It is intended to speed up the translation process and ease the work of translators.

How it works

Pretranslation will be off by default and only enabled for a selected list of locales within selected projects by the L10n Program Managers.

When enabled, each string without any translations will be automatically pretranslated using the 100% match from translation memory or (should that not be available) using the machine translation engine. If there are multiple 100% matches in TM, the one which has been used the most times will be used.

Pretranslations will be assigned a new translation status – Pretranslated. That will allow translators to distinguish them from community submitted translations and suggestions, and make them easier to review and postedit.

The important bit is that pretranslations will be stored to version control systems immediately, which means the postediting step will take place after translations might have already shipped in the product.

Machine translation engines

We have evaluated several different options and came to conclusion that the following scenario works best for our use case:

  • If your locale is supported by the Google AutoML Translation, we’ll use that service and train the engine using the Mozilla translation data sets, which will result in better translation quality than what’s currently suggested in the Machinery tab by generic MT engines.
  • For other locales we’ll use Google Translation API or similar engines.

Get involved

We are in the early stages of the feature rollout. We’re looking for teams that would like to test the feature within a pilot project. If you’re a locale manager and want to opt in, please send an email to pontoon-team@mozilla.com and we’ll add your locale to our list of early adopters.

L10n Report: April 2022 Edition

Delphine

No responses yet

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

Welcome!

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 100 is now in beta, and will be released on May 3, 2022. The deadline to update localization is April 24.

As part of this release, users will see a special celebration message.

You can test this dialog by:

  • Opening about:welcome in Nightly.
  • Copying and pasting the following code in the Browser Console:
    Cc["@mozilla.org/browser/browserglue;1"].getService().wrappedJSObject._showUpgradeDialog()

If you’re not familiar with the Browser Console, take a look at these old instructions to set it up, then paste the command provided above.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Just like Firefox desktop, v100 is right around the corner for mobile.

  • Firefox for Android and Focus for Android: deadline is April 27.
  • Firefox for iOS and Focus for iOS: deadline is April 24.

Some strings landed late in the cycle – but everything should have arrived by now.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Relay Website and add-on

The next release is on April 19th. This release includes new strings along with massive updates to both projects thanks to key terminology changes:

  • alias to mask
  • domain to subdomain
  • real email to true email

To learn more about the change, please check out this Discourse post. If you can’t complete the updates by the release date, there will be subsequent updates soon after the deadline so your work will be in production soon. Additionally, the obsolete strings will be removed once the products have caught up with the updates in most locales.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Review notifications

We added a notification for suggestion reviews, so you’ll now know when your suggestions have been accepted or rejected. These notifications are batched and sent daily.

Changes to Fuzzy strings

Soon, we’ll be making changes to the way we treat Fuzzy strings. Since they aren’t used in the product, they’ll be displayed as Missing. You will no longer find Fuzzy strings on the dashboards and in the progress charts. The Fuzzy filter will be moved to Extra filters. You’ll still see the yellow checkmark in the History panel to indicate that a particular translation is Fuzzy.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

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

  • Thanks to everybody on the TCP/ETP contributor focus group. You’re all amazing and the Customer Experience team can’t thank you enough for everyone’s collaboration on the project.

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)!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

  • If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

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.