L10n Report: March Edition

Théo Chevalier

No responses yet

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

Welcome!

New localizers

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

L10n Community in Matrix

As you might have read in the past weeks, Mozilla turned off IRC and officially switched to a new system for synchronous communications (Matrix), available at: https://chat.mozilla.org/

We have a channel dedicated to l10n community conversations. You can also join the room, after creating an account in Matrix, by searching for the “l10n-community” room.

You can find detailed information on how to access Matrix via browser and mobile apps in this wiki page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix

Messages written in Matrix are also mirrored (“bridged”) to the “Mozilla L10n Community” Telegram channel.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

As explained in the last l10n report, Firefox is now following a fixed 4-weeks release cycle:

  • Firefox 75 is currently in beta and will be released on April 7. The deadline to update localization has just passed (March 24).
  • Firefox 76, currently in Nightly, will move to Beta when 75 is officially released. The deadline to update localizations for that version will be April 21 (4 weeks after the current deadline).

In terms of upcoming content to localize, in Firefox 76 there’s a new authentication dialog, prompting users to authenticate with the Operating System when performing operations like setting a master password, or interacting with saved passwords in about:logins. Localizing this content is particularly challenging on macOS, since only part of the dialog’s text comes from Firefox (highlighted in red in the image below).

Make sure to read the instructions on the dev-l10n mailing list for some advice on how to localize this dialog.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org

A lot of pages were added in the last month. Many are content heavy. Make sure to prioritize the pages based on deadlines and the priority star rating, as well as against other projects.

New and highest priority:
  • firefox/whatsnew_75.lang (due on 27 March, 3pm UTC)
  • firefox/welcome/page6.lang
  • firefox/welcome/page7.lang
Updates and higher priority:
  • mozorg/404.lang
  • mozorg/500.lang
New and lower priority:
  • firefox/compare.lang
  • firefox/compare/chrome.lang
  • firefox/compare/edge.lang
  • firefox/compare/ie.lang
  • firefox/compare/opera.lang
  • firefox/compare/safari.lang
  • firefox/compare/shared.lang

Firefox Accounts:

New content will be ready for localization on a weekly basis, currently released on Fridays.

Web of Things

After the month of March, the team will cease active development. However, they will push translated content to production from time to time.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

The localization of *Privacy Not Included has started! Privacy Not Included is Mozilla’s attempt, through technical research, to help people shop products that are safe, secure and private. The project has been enabled on Pontoon and a first batch of strings has been made available. You can test your work on the staging website, updated almost daily. For the locales that have access to the project, you can also opt-in to localize the About section. If you’re interested, reach out to Théo. Not all locales can translate the project yet but the team is exploring technical options to make it happen. The next edition of the guide is scheduled for this fall, and more content will be exposed over time.

MozFest is moving to Amsterdam! After 10 years in London, the Mozilla Festival will move to Amsterdam for its next edition in March 2021. The homepage is now localized, including in Dutch, and support for Frisian will be added soon. The team will make more content available for localization during the time leading to the next festival edition.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

The SUMO team is going to decommission all old SUMO accounts by the 23rd of March 2020.  If you have an account on SUMO, please take action to migrate it to the Firefox Accounts.

In order to migrate to Firefox Account, it’s better to always start by logging in to your old account and follow the prompt from there. Please read the FAQ and ask on this thread if you have any questions.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Introducing comments

We’ve shipped the ability to add comments in Pontoon. One of the top requested features enables reviewers to give feedback on proposed suggestions, as well as facilitates general discussions about a specific string. Read more on the feature and how to use it on the blog.

Huge thanks to our Outreachy intern April Bowler who developed the feature, and many Mozilla L10n community members who have been actively involved in the design process.

Pre-translation and post-editing

We’re introducing the ability to pre-translate strings using translation memory and machine translation. Pre-translations are marked on dashboards as needing attention, but they end up in repositories (and products). Note that the feature will go through substantial testing and evaluation before it gets enabled in any of the projects.

Thanks to Vishal for developing the feature and bringing us closer to the post-editing world.

Word count

Thanks to Oleksandra, Pontoon finally got the ability to measure project size in words in addition to strings. The numbers are not exposed anywhere in the UI or API yet. If you’re interested in developing such feature, please let us know!

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

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?

 

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.

Introducing comments in Pontoon

Matjaž Horvat

No responses yet

We’ve just shipped the ability to add comments in Pontoon. One of the top requested features enables reviewers to give feedback on proposed suggestions, as well as facilitates general discussions about a specific string.

The feature consists of two pieces. Let’s have a closer look at them.

Screenshot of Pontoon with translation comments, and source comments1. Translation comments

Until now, the review process has been strictly binary, with “Approve” and “Reject” being the only actions available, which made it hard for translation authors to learn from reviewers. With comments now available, reviewers are encouraged to pass knowledge onto translation authors by providing clarifications and advice.

Each translation in the History panel now includes the “Comment” button located in front of the review buttons, which allows you to comment on that particular translation. Reviewers can use it to explain why the translation got approved, rejected or replaced, as well as provide advice to the author.

In addition to reviewers, translation authors and other users can also submit translation comments, for example to ask for advice or to justify their suggestion.

2. Original string comments

But what if you want to discuss how to translate a string before any suggestions are even made? For that purpose we’ve introduced the “Comments” tab in the 3rd column, next to the Machinery and Locales tabs. There you can add comments bound to the original string in general, not one of its translations.

Note that these comments are only visible on the translate page of the locale they were submitted in. We are however already working on the ability for the Project Managers to “Pin” comments, which will make them visible globally across all locales. That feature will also include the ability for localizers to request more context or report an issue in the source string. Stay tuned!

Discoverability of comments

Since we don’t show comments on dashboards, they aren’t really discoverable. That’s why we’ll send notifications to all relevant users once the comment is submitted, e.g. to everyone in the comment thread and translation authors and reviewers. Original string comment notifications will also be sent to team managers and translators.

What’s next?

This feature has been developed as part of the Outreachy internship by our amazing intern April Bowler. We’re very happy that even after the internship she continues to work on the followup features mentioned above, namely the ability to “Pin” comments and the ability to request context & report issue. User mentions are also coming as part of that.

I’d like to thank April for the great work she has done implementing this feature. I’d also like to thank many of our Mozilla L10n community members, who have been actively involved in the designing process.

L10n Report: February Edition

Jeff Beatty

No responses yet

Welcome!

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

New localizers

  • Bora of Kabardian joined us through the Common Voice project
  • Kevin of Swahili
  • Habib and Shamim of Bengali joined us through the WebThings Gateway project

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

New community/locales added

Continue reading …

L10n Report: December Edition

Peiying Mo

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. 

New community/locales added

  • Kabardian

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Firefox 72 is currently in Beta. The deadline to ship localization changes in this version is approaching fast, and will be on December 24th. For the next version, the deadline will be on January 28th.

Most of the new strings are in the onboarding and Content Feature Recommendations (CFR). You can see them in the What’s New panel in the app menu.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

There is a lot going on with mobile these days, especially in regards to the transition of Firefox for Android browser (internal name Fennec) to a brand new browser (currently Firefox Preview, internal name Fenix).

Since the transition is expected to happen some time early 2020 (exact plans are still being discussed internally), we wanted to make a call to action to localizers to start now. We are still waiting for the in-app language switcher to be implemented, but since it is planned for very soon, we think it’s important that localizers get access to strings so they can complete and test their work in time for the actual release of Fenix (final name to be determined still).

The full details about all this can be found in this thread here. Please reach out directly to Delphine in order to activate Fenix in Pontoon for your locale (requests from managers only please), or if you have any questions.

Looking forwards to the best localized Android browser yet!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org

We added a few more pages recently. Though some pages are quite long, they do contain a lot of useful information on the advantages of using Firefox over other browsers. They come in handy when you want to promote Firefox products in your language.

New:

  • firefox/compare.lang
  • firefox/windows-64-bit.lang
  • firefox/welcome/page5.lang

Updates:

  • firefox/campaign-trailhead.lang
  • firefox/new/trailhead.lang
  • firefox/products/developer-quantum.lang

WebThings Gateway

This is a brand new product. The Mozilla WebThings is an open platform for monitoring and controlling devices over the web. It is a software distribution for smart home gateways focused on privacy, security and interoperability.Essentially, it is a smart home platform for bridging new and existing Internet of Things (IoT) devices to the web in a private and secure way.

More information can be found on the website. Speaking of the website, there is a plan to make the site localizable early next year. Stay tuned!

The initial localized content was imported from GitHub, content localized by contributors. Once imported, the localized content is by default in “translated” state. Locale managers and translators, please review these strings soon as they go directly to production.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

This past month has been really busy for the community and for our content manager, we got new and updated articles for Firefox 71 on desktop and the release of many products on mobile: Firefox Preview and Firefox Lite.

Following is a selection of interesting new articles that have been translated:

Newly published localizer facing documentation

Style Guides:

Obsolete:

The Mozilla Localization Community page on Facebook has shut down. To find out how this decision was reached, please read it here.

Events

Three localization events were organized this quarter.

  • The Mozilla Nativo Workshop was held on the 28th – 29th of October in Antigua Guatemala. Localizers from nine localization communities attended the event.
  • The Bengali localization workshop took place in Dhaka, Bangladesh on the 9th – 10th of November. The details of the event were well documented by two l10n contributors in their blogs:  Tanha Islam and Monirul Alom.

    Bengali localization community

The weekend event was widely reported in the local press and social media in Bengali:

    • http://bit.ly/2r26ENr
    • http://bit.ly/2OpEZOy
    • https://www.be.bangla.report/post/45498-cfmmKTlib
    • http://bit.ly/2XrBJ9i
    • http://bit.ly/2CU1ciq
    • https://techshohor.com/161802/
  • The Arabic localization meetup was organized in Tunis, Tunisia on the 6th – 7th of December. The hosting community welcomed visiting localization contributors from Bahrain, Jordan, and Palestinian territories. During the two day workshop, the attendees discussed major challenges facing the geographically distributed community, identified better ways to collaborate, and steps and process to onboard and retain new contributors.

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

  • Kudos to Safa, one of the Arabic locale managers, who single handedly reviewed more than 500 pending suggestions, reviewed and updated the usage of Mozilla brands in Firefox desktop product. He is also leading the effort to improve communications between community members and new contributor onboarding process. Keep up with the good work!

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact on of the l10n-drivers and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out (see list at the bottom)!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve by reaching out to any one of the l10n-drivers listed above.

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Agregamos la funcionalidad de traducir desde un idioma fuente alternativo en Pontoon

Adrian Gaudebert

No responses yet

This article also exists in English.

¿Te gustaría localizar Firefox a tu idioma nativo, pero no mucha facilidad con el inglés como idioma fuente? Si entiendes otro idioma en el que se localiza Firefox, tenemos buenas noticias para ti.

En el último lanzamiento, Pontoon agregó soporte para el uso de localizaciones como cadenas fuentes. En lugar de la cadena original (en inglés), las traducciones del idioma fuente preferido se utilizarán en la lista de cadenas y en el panel de cadenas de origen.

Si todavía no hay una traducción disponible, mostraremos la cadena original, que también estará siempre disponible en el panel “Locales” si se utiliza el idioma fuente alternativo.

Your preferred source locale is used in the string list and the source string panel. You can see the original (English) string in the Locales panel.

Ejemplo del uso del español (es-ES) como idioma fuente para el guaraní.

Para seleccionar un idioma fuente alternativo, va a los ajustes de perfil y elige el idioma fuente preferido. Si quisieras la cadenas originales del proyecto (o sea, el inglés estadounidense) elige “Default project locale”.

Select your preferred source locale in settings

Se encuentra la preferencia de idioma fuente alternativo en los ajustes.

April Bowler es quien desarrollo esta funcionalidad. April nos va a acompañar como ingeniero de prácticas Outreachy del 3 de diciembre 2019 al 3 de marzo 2020. Gracias a las contribuciones de 8 candidatos Outreachy fantásticos, se han resuelto un enorme 40 bugs. Nos emocionamos para ver qué otras mejoras vienen de April en los meses siguientes.

Esperamos que esta última mejora ayudará a ampliar la localización de Firefox y otros productos más allá de los localizadores anglo-hablantes. Como siempre, si tienes alguna sugerencia para mejoras o cualquier duda, déjanos saberlo.

Using alternative source language in Pontoon

Matjaž Horvat

No responses yet

This blog post has been authored in English and translated to Spanish to address Pontoon users who are most impacted by this new feature.

Would you like to localize Firefox to your native language, but you don’t feel confident in using English as a reference language? If you understand another language Firefox is localized into, we have news for you.

In its latest release, Pontoon added support for using localizations as source strings. Instead of the original (English) string, translations from your preferred source locale will be used in the string list and the source string panel.

If a translation isn’t available yet, we’ll show the original string, which will also always be available in the Locales panel if the alternative source locale is used.

Your preferred source locale is used in the string list and the source string panel. You can see the original (English) string in the Locales panel.

Using Spanish (es-ES) as the source locale during localization of Firefox to Guarani (gn).

To use the alternative source locale, simply go to your Settings and select your preferred source locale. If you want to use the original strings used by the project (usually English), select “Default project locale”.

Select your preferred source locale in settings

Select your preferred source locale in your Settings.

This feature has been developed by April Bowler, who will be our intern in the Outreachy Round 19, which runs from December 3rd, 2019 to March 3rd, 2020. A whopping 40 bugs have been fixed by 8 outstanding contributors during the Outreachy contribution period and we can’t wait to see what April will come up within the next months.

We hope this latest addition will extend the localization of Firefox and other projects localized on Pontoon beyond English-speaking localizers. As always, if you have suggestions for improvements or run into issues, please let us know.

L10n Report: November Edition

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

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

As anticipated in previous reports, the release cycles are getting progressively shorter, in order to reach a consistent 4 weeks length in the first half of 2020.

Firefox 71 will be released next week, on December 3rd. At that point Firefox 72 will move to beta, and the deadline to ship updates for that version will be on December 24th.

Firefox 71 will ship with 3 new languages: Catalan (Valencian) (ca-valencia), Tagalog (tl), and Triqui (trs).

Compared to Firefox 70, the last release has been relatively light in terms of new strings to translate. That’s a great time to do a full test of your localization, to make sure everything works as expected, in particular for new users switching – or coming back – to Firefox.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

As most of you know, Fenix (Firefox Preview) has been an ongoing and ever evolving priority at Mozilla, as we work on creating the best Android mobile browser yet. The transition to Fenix is amplifying as we see its positive impact grow among our users. Be ready for something big early 2020, as our efforts are ramping up dramatically.

If you are interested in localizing Fenix, please reach out to delphine so she can get things going (please note there is not yet a locale-switcher in place, so you should be sure your locale is supported by Android system).

Talking about in-app locale switcher for Fenix, work is currently happening on that front and should be ready by the beginning of next year. Which means we will be able to support all locales, independently of what Android system and/or carriers have to offer. This will help us extend our reach globally and make sure any locale that wants to contribute is treated equally.

In the same vein, we’ve been working hard on making sure we can support our right-to-left locales in Fenix. Reza, a core Mozilla Persian localizer (who you will find called out in our “Friends of the Lion” section), has been a key helper in this initiative and is helping push things forwards. Thank you Reza!

Lockwise has also been a growing initiative that spans across our desktop and mobile products. We have both an Android and iOS version. If you’ve been localizing Firefox iOS, feel free to request the iOS version of this project from the Pontoon project page. For Android, send your request to delphine so she can set you up. All this will help in providing a consistent experience between desktop Lockwise and mobile Lockwise.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org

Quite a few pages were added and updated in recent weeks. Some of the deadlines are mandatory for Tier 1 markets and others are for all languages in order to be included for certain release.

Update: due on November 25

  • firefox/mobile-2019.lang
  • firefox/whatsnew.lang

New: due on December 11

  • firefox/welcome/page3.lang
  • firefox/welcome/page4.lang

The following pages are important pages that have been activated on production. Please prioritize accordingly:

  • footer.lang
  • navigation.lang
  • firefox/all-unified.lang

SuMo

The project will be on a weekly code push, and localized content will be pushed to production much more regularly than it has been.

Legal documents

In recent months, quite a few legal documents were revised and updated. New documents were created and new languages were added. Reviews and feedback are welcome:

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

New donate website

Launch has been delayed, but it will happen as soon as the last blockers are fixed. Thanks for all your work so far! Next steps for this project are exposing the CMS content and a few strings specific to the Thunderbird donate page. This will be the first CMS fully connected to Pontoon, so there are still some last minute issues to fix.

Foundation website

A first batch of UI strings for the foundation website has been exposed in Pontoon for all supported locales. A few strings that are not yet localizable are going to be exposed over the next few weeks.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

3-column translation workbench layout

We shipped the first batch of review process improvements that will be coming to Pontoon, notably the new 3-column translation workbench layout. It brings several changes:

  1. A 3rd column has been added in addition to the string list and the editor, which hosts Machinery and Locales panels.
  2. User suggestions and Machinery results – both of which are critical during the review process – can now be seen at the same time.
  3. Editor is now centered in the middle of the screen and uses the same amount of space as before. Translations in History panel use avatars.
  4. String list occupies half of its previous width. Source strings and translations are in separate lines and no longer truncated.

We hope you like the new layout as much as we do. And please let us know if you have any problems!

Pontoon - 3 Columns LayoutOutreachy contribution period complete

Outreachy contribution period is complete, which means we’re in the process of selecting our intern for this round. Accepted interns will be announced on November 26, and the internship will start a week later on December 3. Thanks to April, Dinda, Anastasia, Karskaja, Katherine, Michael, Monika and Okpo for making a contribution and fixing a whooping 37 bugs in total so far.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

Other projects

The Firefox Screenshots project has been removed from Pontoon. The website hasn’t been updated in a long time, and it’s scheduled for removal. We’re working on porting the add-on code to Fluent, and migrating existing translations into each l10n repository. At that point, the add-on will be localizable as part of Firefox.

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)

Opportunities

It’s the end of the year and there are so many unreviewed suggestions in Pontoon! We’re working out a project campaign for December to get your help to reduce the number of unreviewed strings for your locale and start the year fresh. Stay tuned for details!

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

  • A big shout out to Reza Habibi, who once more is helping out with our right-to-left (RTL) implementation – this time for Fenix! As many already know, this is not the first time Reza helps with this initiative. In fact, he was a key stakeholder during Firefox OS days, and has since then helped with creating RTL specs, as well as finding, reporting, and fixing bugs for many Mozilla projects. He’s also a core Persian localizer, so double kudos to him 🙂
  • Talking about RTL, kudos to Itiel: not only is the main contributor for Hebrew, but he’s constantly listed in These Weeks in Firefox for fixing several RTL bugs in our desktop browser.

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact on of the l10n-drivers and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out (see list at the bottom)!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve by reaching out to any one of the l10n-drivers listed above.

L10n Report: October Edition

Théo Chevalier

No responses yet

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

Welcome!

New localizers

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

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

As explained in detail in the previous l10n report, cycles are starting to shorten towards the goal of 4 weeks. While Firefox 70 is going to be released in a few days, on October 22, the deadline to ship any update in Firefox 71 will be on November 19.

Talking about Firefox 71, congratulations to Catalan (Valencian) (ca-valencia), Tagalog (tl), and Triqui (trs) for reaching an important milestone: with this version, they will move to Beta, and then will be officially released on December 3. Thanks to them, Firefox 71 will be shipping with 96 localizations.

We have also added two new locales to Nightly in 71: Bodo (brx) and Tibetan (bo). If you speak one of these languages and want to help, head to Pontoon!

Talking about new content to localize, there are two main focus areas in 71:

  • Separation of Sync and Firefox Accounts. So far, “Signed in” was often used to indicate that you are connected to a Firefox Account, and that Sync is enabled. Now it will be possible to be signed in to an account, but not have Sync enabled. This needs to be reflected in all preferences, dialogs, notifications, etc. and it’s likely going to take more than one release to complete. The reason for this change is that Firefox Account is going to be used for more services in the future – it’s already used to monitor logins for websites with known data breaches, for example.
  • It’s now possible to use a different search engine in private windows. This new feature includes preferences, as well as new items for the context menu, and a banner to explain this new functionality to users.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Firefox Accounts

A lot of content is made available for localization. The last code push to production is on October 21 which will include localized content for the October launch.

Mozilla.org

A few pages were made available for localization in the last two weeks.

  • footer.lang and navigation.lang are available to all locales. Though the deadline is set to mid November, we have enough locales completed which make up 90%+ user base. Both files will be activated on production in the coming days.
  • firefox/home-master.lang is open to all locales and will be on production as soon as the page is completed. P1 markets (de, en-CA, en-GB, es-ES, and fr) must be completed by October 20th.
  • firefox/welcome/page2.lang is available in languages supported by Pocket and will be activated on production as soon as the page is fully localized. P1 markets (de, en-CA, en-GB, es-ES, and fr) must be complete by October 20th.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

The new donate website is available in Pontoon, with the most critical strings (UI and payment flow). As a reminder, the old project is still available on Pontoon as read-only, in case you need to find a previous translation not captured by translation memory. The FAQ and Ways to give pages will be added in the next few days.

The Advocacy team launched a YouTube Regrets site this week, sharing stories sent by YouTube users. Mozilla is showcasing these stories to draw attention to the human impact of optimization algorithms gone wrong and pressure YouTube to be more transparent in their work to fix the problems with their recommendation engine. You can read more about the specifics of the campaign and how it relates to Mozilla work to push for more trustworthy AI in consumer tech here and view the beautiful campaign site here.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

Firefox 70 is releasing next week and a lot of new articles have been published or updated:

Firefox Monitor

Password manager = Lockwise

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Over the last year, we have been re-building Pontoon’s Translate page from scratch, to use better technologies and enable various sorts of improvements. This new app, nicknamed Translate.Next, has been released to all Pontoon users earlier this week! Find out more in our previous blog post about Translate.Next.

As a direct consequence of this work, we have been able to fix a few long-standing issues with placeables. Unexpected side-effects, better variable handling, catching more terms that should not be translated… the full list of changes can be seen on GitHub.

It’s Outreachy season, and Pontoon is participating! We have thus been seeing a lot of activity from new contributors these last few weeks, leading to more bugs being resolved. Notably, you can now very easily copy the link to a given string thanks to the “Copy Link” functionality:

Newly published localizer facing documentation

Mozilla general style guide is updated with revised branding policy.
Testing instructions for the new Mozilla Donate website have been updated.

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

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact on of the l10n-drivers and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out (see list at the bottom)!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

 

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve by reaching out to any one of the l10n-drivers listed above.

Here comes Pontoon’s new Translate application

Adrian Gaudebert

15 responses

If you have contributed to Mozilla’s localization in the past few years, chances are high that you have interacted with Pontoon’s translation page. That page is the most important one of the Pontoon web app, as it is where people can create, review and manage translations for most of the products Mozilla makes. Today we are happy to announce that we are soon going to release an entirely re-written version of that page, nicknamed “Translate.Next”. This post shares all the details about this release, and should answer the questions you might have about it.

What is Translate.Next?

Pontoon was started in 2011, and has grown quite a lot since then. Most of the back-end, using Python and Django, has been kept up-to-date and is still doing mostly fine, but the front-end, and specifically the Translate app, is in a terrible shape. Our code has accumulated a lot of technical debt, and is very difficult to maintain and evolve.

After I joined the Pontoon team in the summer of 2017, I spent some time auditing the translate application code, and it quickly became clear to me that a full rewrite would bring a lot of value. Here are some of the benefits this brings:

  1. removing technical debt and making our code saner;
  2. adding better test coverage for our front-end;
  3. enabling the localization of Pontoon, starting with the Translate page;
  4. structurally enabling some of the many improvements our users have been asking for.

Over the last year and a half, Matjaž and myself have been spending a lot of our time working on rewriting the Translate page from scratch, using more recent, better adapted technologies, making our code a lot more modular and maintainable. (If you are interested in knowing more about the technologies we used, it is described in our github repository — there’s some React, redux, Jest and Flow in there. )

How is it different from the current page?

Translate.Next is just the first part of our effort to improve Pontoon’s translation page, while the second part will be the functional changes we’ll start working on now. For the time being though, translation page should be as much as possible the same in terms of features, interface and usability as the current Translate page. We have done our best to reproduce the same layouts and behaviors so that the switch would be as transparent as possible to everyone.

However, there are a few things that we decided to change already. The most visible of them is the navigation menu, which now requires less clicks to navigate localizable resources thanks to the removal of the infamous Go button.

Here’s what it looks like now:

Pontoon's current Translate navigation bar

And here is what it looks like with Translate.Next:

Pontoon's new Translate navigation bar

The other changes should be fairly inoffensive. We have removed the Tab shortcut in the Editor, as well as support for in-context localization, as it seems both were hardly ever used. It’s also not possible to resize the columns yet, as we have plans to evolve the page layout very soon and the behavior of this feature will change.

If you notice something not mentioned here is different, then it’s very probably a bug, and we would like to hear from you. More on that later in this post!

When will I see the new page?

We intend to do a “rollout” release, meaning that we will turn the feature on for a small percentage of users, and then will increase that number over time until we reach 100%. The users who get to experience the new Translate.Next page will be chosen randomly by a tool we use.

However, we can, and will, add exceptions. Namely, everyone who participated in our last round of testing and has Translate.Next turned on will keep it on. And we can add more exceptions, so if you don’t want to wait for your turn, you can simply contact us (Adrian or Matjaž) with the email address you use to log in to Pontoon, and we’ll give you access.

Note that we will not allow users to opt out, unless there is a very good reason for that. We will take your feedback and categorize it into two buckets: regressions, and the rest. Regressions are big issues that prevent localizers from performing their tasks. They are blockers to advancing Mozilla’s mission and thus we want to take quick action to unblock people if that happens. A regression will very likely mean that we will turn Translate.Next off for everyone until we have fixed it.

Every other issue will be treated as a bug, and we will do our best to solve these in a timely manner, but we kindly ask that you bear with us in the meantime. We do not want to revert everyone back to the old Translate page for a problem that is not blocking you.

The release schedule, baring we don’t find any regressions, is as follow:

Wednesday, October 2: release to a random 10% of users.
Monday, October 7: release to a random 30% of users.
Wednesday, October 9: release to a random 50% of users.
Monday, October 14: release to all users.

Bugs and regressions found along the way will delay that schedule. We will keep you updated if any such thing happens.

How do I report issues?

If you notice that something works differently than before, or if you find that something is broken, we strongly encourage you to tell us as soon as possible. There are several ways you can do that.

The easiest is to simply add a comment here, below this blog post. Please write a description of your problem, and ideally steps to reproduce it. When commenting, make sure to put a valid email address in the “E-mail” field so that we can reach out to you if we need more details.

If you enjoy using the Mozilla Community discourse forum, you can also describe your issue in the dedicated Translate.Next topic.

And finally, if you are comfortable using Bugzilla, you can go straight there and file a bug.

If you want to check our list of known issues, or follow the status of a reported bug, we keep an updated list on Pontoon’s Wiki page.

Other questions

How do I know I’m using Translate.Next?

There are 2 ways to know: first, the menu will look a bit different (see above). Second, and probably simpler: there will be a message in the top right corner saying you are using Translate.Next. 🙂

Can I revert back to the old Translate page?

No, once you’re on Translate.Next, the only way to get back to the old Translate page is if we find a critical regression and revert everyone. We cannot revert individuals to the old page.

Can I opt-in to Translate.Next?

Yes, absolutely. Just contact us (Adrian or Matjaž) asking that you want in, and give us the email address that you use to login on Pontoon.

Let’s release!

Thank you for helping with this release. We hope you will enjoy the new Translate page, and all the cool changes we will be able to make in the future thanks to that. And keep an eye out for the new page to show up on your Pontoon. 😉

L10n Report: September 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!

New localizers

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

New community/locales added

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

As anticipated in the previous edition of the L10N Report, Firefox 70 is going to be a large release, introducing new features and several improvements around Tracking Protection, privacy and security. The deadline to ship any updates in Firefox 70 is October 8. Make sure to test your localization before the deadline, focusing on:

  • about:protections
  • about:logins
  • Privacy preferences and protection panel (the panel displayed when you click on the shield icon in the address bar)

Be also mindful of a few last-minute changes that were introduced in Beta to allow for better localization.

If your localization is missing several strings and you don’t know where to start from, don’t forget that you can use Tags in Pontoon to focus on high priority content first (example).

Upcoming changes to the release cycle

The current version of the rapid release cycle allows for cycles of different length, ranging from 6 to 8 weeks. Over two years ago we moved to localize Nightly by default. Assuming an average 6-weeks cycle for the sake of simplicity:

  • New strings are available for localization a few days after landing in mozilla-central and showing up in Nightly (they spend some time in a quarantine repository, to avoid exposing localizers to unclear content).
  • Depending on when a string lands within the cycle, you’d have up to 6 weeks to localize before it moves to Beta. In the worst case scenario, a string could land at the very end of the cycle, and will need to be translated after that version of Firefox moves to Beta.
  • Once it moves to Beta, you still have almost the full cycle (4.5 weeks) to localize. Ideally, this time should be spent to fine tune and test the localization, more than catching up with missing strings.

A few days ago it was announced that Firefox is progressively moving to a 4-weeks release cycle. If you’re focusing your localization on Nightly, this should have a relatively small impact on your work:

  • In Nightly, you’d have up to 4 weeks to localize content before i moves to Beta.
  • In Beta, you’d have up to 2.5 weeks to localize.

The cycles will shorten progressively, stabilizing to 4 weeks around April 2020. Firefox 75 will be the first one with a 4-weeks cycle in both Nightly and Beta.

While this shortens the time available for localization, it also means that the schedule becomes predictable and, more importantly, localization updates can ship faster: if you fix something in Beta today, it could take up to 8 weeks to ship in release. With the new cycle, it will always take a maximum of 4 weeks.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Firefox Accounts

A lot more strings have landed since the last report.  Please allocate time accordingly after finishing other higher priority projects. An updated deadline will be added to Pontoon in the coming days. This will ensure localized content is on production as part of the October launch.

Mozilla.org

A few pages have been recently added and more will be added in the coming weeks to support the major release in October. Most of the pages will be enabled in de, en-CA, en-GB, and fr locales only, and some can be opted-in. Please note, Mozilla staff editors will be localizing the pages in German and French.

Legal documentation

We have quite a few updates in legal documentation. If your community is interested in reviewing any of the following, please adhere to this process: All change requests will be done through pull requests on GitHub. With a few exceptions, all the suggested changes should go through a peer review for approval before the changes go to production.

MDN & SuMo

Due to recent merge to a single Bengali locale on the product side, the articles were consolidated as well. For the overlapped articles, the ones selected were based on criteria such as article completion and the date of the completion.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

Newly published articles for Fire TV:

Newly published articles for Preview:

Newly published articles for Firefox for iOS:

Improving TM matching of Fluent strings

Translation Memory (TM) matching has been improved by changing the way we store Fluent strings in our TM. Instead of storing full messages (together with their IDs and other syntax elements), we now store text only. Obviously, that increases the number of results shown in the Machinery tab, and also makes our TMX exports more usable. Thanks to Jordi Serratosa for driving this effort forward! As part of the fix, we also discovered and fixed bug 1578155, which further improves TM matching for all file formats.

Faster saving of translations.

As part of fixing bug 1578057, Michal Stanke discovered a potential speed up for saving translations. Specifically, improving the way we update the latest activity column in dashboards resulted in a noticeable speedup of 10-20% for saving a translation. That’s a huge win for an operation that happens around 2,000 times every day. Well done, Michal!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve by reaching out to any one of the l10n-drivers listed above.