L10n report: April edition

Théo Chevalier

3 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!

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

The deadline to ship localization updates in Firefox 67 is quickly approaching (April 30). Firefox 68 is going to be an ESR version, so it’s particularly important to ship the best localization possible. The deadline for that will be June 25.

The migration to Fluent is progressing steadily, and we are approaching two important milestones:

  • 3 thousand FTL messages.
  • Less than 2 thousand DTD strings.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Lot’s of things have been happening on the mobile front, and much more is going to follow shortly.

One of the first things we’d like to call out if that Fenix browser strings have arrived for localization! While work has been opened up to only a small subset of locales, you can expect us to add more progressively, quite soon. More details around this can be found here and here.

We’ve also exposed strings for Firefox Reality, Mozilla’s mixed-reality browser! Also open to only a subset of locales, we expect to be able to add more locales once the in-app locale switcher is in place. Read more about this here.

There are more new and exciting projects coming up in the next few weeks, so as usual, stay tuned to the Dev.l10n mailing list for more announcements!

Concerning existing projects: Firefox iOS v17 l10n cycle is going to start within the next days, so keep an eye out on your Pontoon folder.

And concerning Fennec, just like for Firefox desktop, the deadline to ship localization updates in Firefox 67 is quickly approaching (April 30). Please read the section above for more details.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org

  • firefox/whatsnew_67.lang: The page must be fully localized by 3 May to be included in the Firefox 67 product release.
  • navigation.lang: The file has been available on Pontoon for more than 2 months. This newly designed navigation menu will be switched on whether it is localized or not. This means every page you browse on mozilla.org will show the new layout. If the file is not fully localized, you will see the menu mixed with English text.
  • Three new pages will be opened up for localization in select locales: adblocker,  browser history and what is a browser. Be on the lookout on Pontoon.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

What’s new or coming up in Fluent

Fluent Syntax 1.0 has been published! The syntax is now stable. Thanks to everyone who shared their feedback about Fluent in the past; you have made Fluent better for everyone. We published a blog post on Mozilla Hacks with more details about this release and about Fluent in general.

Fluent is already used in over 3000 messages in Firefox, as well as in Firefox Send and Common Voice. If you localize these projects, chances are you already localized Fluent messages. Thanks to the efforts of Matjaž and Adrian, Fluent is already well-supported in Pontoon. We continue to improve the Fluent experience in Pontoon and we’re open to your feedback about how to make it best-in-class.

You can learn more about the Fluent Syntax on the project’s website, through the Syntax Guide, and in the Mozilla localizer documentation. If you want to quickly see it in action, try the Fluent Playground—an online editor with shareable Fluent snippets.

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

  • Kudos to Sonia who introduced Mozilla and Pontoon to her fellow attendees. She ran a short workshop on localization at Dive into Open Source event held in Jalandhar, India in late March. After the event, she onboarded and mentored Anushka, Jasmine, and Sanja who have started contributing to various projects in Punjabi.

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.

Implementing Fluent in a localization tool

Matjaž Horvat

No responses yet

In order to produce natural sounding translations, Fluent syntax supports gender, plurals, conjugations, and virtually any other grammatical category. The syntax is designed to be simple to read, but translators without developer background might find more complex concepts harder to deal with.

That’s why we designed a Fluent-specific user interface in Pontoon, which unleashes Fluent powers to localizers who aren’t coders. Any other general purpose Translation Management System (TMS) with support for popular localization formats can follow the example. Let’s have a closer look at Fluent implementation in Pontoon.

Storing Fluent strings in the DB

We store Fluent translations in the Translation table differently compared to other file formats.

In the string column we usually only store the translatable content, which is sufficient for representing the translation across the application. For example, string hello = Hello, world! in the .properties file format is stored as Hello, world! in Translation.string. In Fluent, we store the entire string: hello = Hello, world!.

The main reason for storing full Fluent strings are attributes, which can be present in Fluent Messages and Terms in addition to their values. Having multiple localizable values stored together allows us to build advanced UIs like the ones we use for access keys (see below).

The alternative to storing the serialized string is to store its AST. At the time of implementing Fluent support in Pontoon, the AST wasn’t as stable as the syntax, but today you should be fine with using either of these approaches.

Different presentation formats

Due to their potential complexity, Fluent strings can be presented in 4 different ways in Pontoon:

  1. In simplified form: used in string list, History tab and various other places across Pontoon, it represents the string as it appears to the end-user in the application. We generate it using FluentSerializer.serializeExpression(). For example, hello = Hello, world! would appear simply as Hello, world!.
  2. In read-only form: used to represent the source string.
  3. In editable form: used to represent the translation in the editor.
  4. As source: used to represent the translation in the source editor.
Presentation formats

Where are different presentation formats used.
You can access the source view by clicking on the FTL button.

Example walk-through

The following is a list of various Fluent strings and their appearances in a Pontoon translation interface with source string panel on top and translation editor below. In the first batch are the strings using the existing Pontoon UI, shared with other file formats.

Simple strings
Simple strings

title = About Localization

Multiline strings
Multiline strings

feedbackUninstallCopy =
    Your participation in Firefox Test Pilot means
    a lot! Please check out our other experiments,
    and stay tuned for more to come!

Strings with a single attribute
Strings with a single attribute

emailOptInInput =
    .placeholder = email goes here :)

Next up are Fluent strings, which have attributes in addition to the value or multiple attributes. A separate text input is available for each of them.

Strings with a value and attributes
Strings with a value and an attribute

shotIndexNoExpirationSymbol = ∞
    .title = This shot does not expire

Since Fluent lets you combine labels and access keys within the same string, we designed a dedicated UI that lists all the allowed access keys as you translate the label. You can also type in a custom key if none of the candidates meets your criteria.

Access keys
Access keys

file-menu =
    .label = File
    .accesskey = F

Terms are similar to regular messages but they can only be used as references in other messages. Hence, they are best used to define vocabulary and glossary items which can be used consistently across the localization of the entire product. Terms can have multiple variants, and Pontoon makes it easy to add/remove them.

Terms
Terms

# Translated string
-brandShortName = { $case ->
    [nominative] Firefox Račun
   *[genitive] Firefox Računa
}

Selectors are a powerful feature of Fluent. They are used when there’s a need for multiple variants of the string based on an external variable. In the case case, PLATFORM().

Selectors
Selectors

platform = { PLATFORM() ->
    [win] Options
   *[other] Preferences
}

A common use case of selectors are plurals. When you translate a pluralized source string, Pontoon renders empty CLDR plural categories used in the target locale, each accompanied by an example number.

Plurals
Plurals

delete-all-message = { $num ->
    [one] Delete this download?
   *[other] Delete { $num } downloads?
}

Selectors can also be used in attributes. Pontoon hides most of the complexity.

Selectors in attributes
Selectors in attributes

download-choose-folder =
    .label = { PLATFORM() ->
        [macos] Choose…
       *[other] Browse…
    }
    .accesskey = { PLATFORM() ->
        [macos] e
       *[other] o
    }

If a value or an attribute contains multiple selectors, Pontoon indents them for better readability.

Strings with multiple selectors
Strings with multiple selectors

selector-multi = There { $num ->
    [one] is one email
   *[other] are many emails
} for { $gender ->
   *[masculine] him
    [feminine] her
}

Strings with nested selectors are not supported in Fluent editor, in which case Pontoon falls back to the source editor. The source editor is always available, and you can switch to it by clicking on the FTL button.

Unsupported strings
Unsupported strings

Next steps

The current state of the Fluent UI in Pontoon allows us to use Fluent to localize Firefox and various other projects. We don’t want to stop here, though. Instead, we’re looking to improve the Fluent experience further and make it the best among available localization formats. You can track the list of Fluent-related Pontoon bugs in Bugzilla. Some of the highlights include:

  • Ability to change default variant
  • Ability to add/remove variants
  • Ability to add selectors to simple messages
  • Making machinery usable with more complex strings
  • Prefilling complex message skeleton in source editor

Changing the Language of Firefox Directly From the Browser

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

No responses yet

Language Settings

In Firefox there are two main user facing settings related to languages:

  • Web content: when you visit a web page, the browser will communicate to the server which languages you’d like to see content in. Technically, this is done by sending an Accept-Language HTTP header, which contains a list of locale codes in the user’s preferred order.
  • User interface: the language in which you want to see the browser (menus, preferences, etc.).

The difference between the two is not as intuitive as it might seem. A lot of users change the web content settings, and expect the user interface to change.

The Legacy Chaos

While the preferences for web content have been exposed in Firefox since its first versions, changing the language used for the user interface has always been challenging. Here’s the painful journey users had to face until a few months ago:

  • First of all, you need to be aware that there are other languages available. There are no preferences exposing this information, and documentation is spread across different websites.
  • You need to find and install a language pack – a special type of add-on – from addons.mozilla.org.
  • If the language used in the operating system is different from the one you’re trying to install in Firefox, you need to create a new preference in about:config, and set it to the correct locale code. Before Firefox 59 and intl.locale.requested, you would need to manually set the general.useragent.locale pref in any case, not just when there’s a discrepancy.

The alternative is to install a build of Firefox already localized in your preferred language. But, once again, they’re not so easy to find. Imagine you work in a corporate environment that provides you with an operating system in English (en-US). You search the Web for “Firefox download”, and automatically end up on this download page, which doesn’t provide information on the language you’re about to download. You need to pay a lot of attention and notice the link to other languages.

If you already installed Firefox in the wrong language, you need to uninstall it, find the installer in the correct language, and reinstall it. As part of the uninstall process on Windows, we ask users to volunteer for a quick survey to explain why they’re uninstalling the browser, and the amount of them saying something along the line of “wrong language” or “need to reinstall in the right language” is staggering, especially considering this is an optional comment within an optional survey. It’s a clear signal, if one was ever needed, that things need to improve.

Everything Changes with Firefox 65

Fast forward to Firefox 65:

We introduced a new Language section. Directly from the General pane it’s now possible to switch between languages already available in Firefox, removing the need for manually setting preferences in about:config. What if the language is not available? Then you can simply Search for more languages… from the dropdown menu.

Add your preferred language to the list (French in this case).

And restart the browser to have the interface localized in French. Notice how the message is displayed in both languages, to provide users with another hint to the user that they selected the right language.

If you’re curious, you can see a diagram of the complete user interaction here.

A lot happens under the hood for this brief interaction:

  • When the user asks for more languages, Firefox connects to addons.mozilla.org via API to retrieve the list of languages available for the version in use.
  • When the user adds the language, Firefox downloads and installs the language pack for the associated locale code.
  • In order to improve the user experience, if available it also downloads dictionaries associated with the requested language.
  • When the browser is restarted, the new locale code is set as first in the intl.locale.requested preference.

This feature is enabled by default in Beta and Release versions of Firefox. Language packs are not reliable on Nightly, given that strings change frequently, and a language still considered compatible but incomplete could lead to a completely broken browser (condition known as “yellow screen of death“, where the XUL breaks due to missing DTD entities).

What’s Next

First of all, there are still a few bugs to fix (you can find a list in the dependencies of the tracking bug). Sadly, there are still several places in the code that assume the language will never change, and cache the translated content too aggressively.

The path forward has yet to be defined. Completing the migration to Fluent would drastically improve the user experience:

  • Language switching would be completely restartless.
  • Firefox would support a list of fallback locales. With the old technology, if a translation is missing it can only fall back to English. With Fluent, we can set a fallback chain, for example Ligurian->Italian->English.

There are also areas of the browser that are not covered by language packs, and would need to be rewritten (e.g. the profile manager). For these, the language used always remains the one packaged in the build.

The user experience could also be improved. For example, can we make selecting the language part of a multiplatform onboarding experience? There are a lot of hints that we could take from the host operating system, and prompt the user about installing and selecting a different language. What if the user browses a lot of German content, but he’s using the browser in English? Should we suggest them that it’s possible to switch language?

With Firefox 66 we’re also starting to collect Telemetry data about internationalization settings – take a look at the table at the bottom of about:support – to understand more about our users, and how these changes in Preferences impact language distribution and possibly retention.

For once, Firefox is well ahead of the competition. For example, for Chrome it’s only possible to change language on Windows and Chromebook, while Safari only uses the language of your macOS.

This is the result of an intense cross-team effort. Special thanks to Zibi Braniecki for the initial idea and push, and all the work done under the hood to improve Firefox internationalization infrastructure, Emanuela Damiani for UX, and Mark Striemer for the implementation.

L10n report: March edition

Delphine

No responses yet

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Schedule and important dates

Firefox 66 has been released on March 19, which means:

  • Firefox 68 is currently in Nightly.
  • Firefox 67 is in Beta.

The deadline to ship updates for Beta will be on April 30. Also don’t forget that Firefox 68 is going to be the next ESR version: ideally you should be localizing it early in Nightly, in order to have a good amount of time for testing before it reaches the release channel.

Removing unmaintained locales

This is not an action that we take lightly, because it’s demoralizing for the Community and potentially confusing for users, but in some cases we have to remove locales from Firefox builds. As outlined in the document, we try our best to revive the localization effort, and only act when it’s clear that we can’t solve the problem in other ways.

In Firefox 68 we’re going to remove the following locales: Assamese (as), South-African English (en-ZA), Maithili (mai), Malayalam (ml), Odia (or).

We’re also working with the Bengali community to unify two locales – Bengali India (bn-IN) and Bengali Banglashed (bn-BD) – under a single locale (bn), to optimize the Community resources we have.

Firefox Monitor

The add-on for Firefox Monitor is now localized as part of the main Firefox projects. If you want to test it:

  • Open about:config and create a new boolean setting, extensions.fxmonitor.enabled, and set it to true.
  • Navigate to a breached site. You can pick a website from this list, just make sure that the “AddedDate” is within the last 12 months.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Just like for Firefox Desktop, the deadline to ship updates for Fennec Beta will be on April 30. Read the previous section of this report for more details surrounding that.

A notable Android update this month (that we’ve just announced on the dev-l10n mailing list – please consider following if it’s not yet the case) is that we’ve exposed on Pontoon the new Android-Components strings as part of the new Android-l10n project, to a small subset of locales.

Fenix browser strings are right around the corner as well, and will be exposed very soon in that same project, so stay tuned. Read up here for more details on all this.

On Firefox iOS side, we’re still working hard on shipping the upcoming version, which will be v16. Deadline for localization was today (March 21st), and with this new version we are adding one new locale: Vietnamese! Congrats to the team for shipping their first localized version of Firefox iOS!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

AMO and Facebook Container extension

Mozilla is partnering with the European Union to promote its Facebook Container extension in advance of the upcoming EU elections. We have translated the listing for the extension on addons.mozilla.org into 24 languages primarily used within the EU, and we could use your help localizing the user interface for addons.mozilla.org so people can have a more complete experience when downloading the extension. AMO frontend and server are two huge projects. If your locale has a lot to catch up, you can focus on these top priority strings the team has identified (note there are two tabs). You can search for them in the AMO Frontend project in Pontoon.

In order to promote the extension in 24 languages, we need to enable AMO server and AMO Frontend in all the languages, including Maltese, of which we don’t have a community. We also added a few languages out of product requirement without communities’ agreement.  These languages are on the “read-only” locale list. They are Croatian, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian for AMO Frontend, and Estonian and Latvian for AMO Server. If any of these communities are interested in localizing at least the high priority strings, please email the l10n-drivers so we can change the language setting.

Mozilla.org

There are a few updates coming soon. To prioritize, make sure to focus on shared files first (main.lang, download_button.lang), then the rest by star priority rating, or by deadline if applicable. You may see a few of the same strings appearing in several files. We usually leverage existing translations into a brand new file, but less so for updated file. In the latter case, please rely on Pontoon’s `Machinery` feature to leverage from your previous work.

Common Voice

Many new contributors joined the Mozilla localization communities through this project and are only interested in this project. Though there is an existing community that has been localizing other projects, the new contributors are new to localization, to Pontoon, to Mozilla localization process. They need your help with onboarding. Many have contributed to the project and are waiting for constructive feedback. Locale managers, please check the Common Voice project to see if there are strings waiting to be reviewed in your locale. Try to arrange resources to provide feedback in a timely manner. Based on the quality of the new contributors’ work and their interest, you can grant them broader permission at project level.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

A very quick update on the misinformation campaign — the scorecard mentioned last month won’t be released, due to external changes. The good news is that a lot of the work done by the team is being reused and multiple campaigns will be launched instead. Details are evolving quickly, so there’s not much to share yet. We will keep you posted!

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Translate.Next. Soon we’ll begin testing of the rewritten translation interface of Pontoon. The look & feel will largely remain the same, but the codebase will be completely different, allowing us to fulfill user requests in a more timely manner. Stay tuned for more updates in the usual l10n channels!

Improving experience for 3rd party installations. While used internally at Mozilla, Pontoon is a general purpose TMS with good support for popular localization file formats, ready to localize a variety of open source projects, apps or websites. Vishal started improving experience for 3rd party deployments by making Pontoon homepage customizable instead of hardcoding the Mozilla-specific content used on pontoon.mozilla.org. The path to setting up a first project for localization is now also more obvious.

 

Under the hood changes. Thanks to Jotes and Aniruddha, our Python test coverage has  improved. On top of that, Jotes started making first steps towards migrating our codebase to Python3.

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: February edition

Peiying Mo

No responses yet

Welcome!

New localizers

The following contributors came to us through the Common Voice project.

  • Paramashivam of Tamil, also very active on the Firefox project
  • Roi of Hebrew on a variety of projects
  • Théo of Kinyarwanda has made a lot of progress in a short period of time!
  • Danielius of Lithuanian joins us last week
  • Nienke of Frisian leading a group of colleagues focuses their effort on sentence collection at the moment

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

This week we’re going to reach an important milestone for Fluent in Firefox, having more Fluent strings than DTDs in mozilla-central (currently 2466 vs 2489). There are already 5 patches in review to migrate more elements to Fluent, thanks to the work of the MSU Capstone students: Page Info window, contextual menu for tabs, print dialogs, about:privatebrowsing, Password Manager dialog.

Here are a few important dates for the current release cycles:

  • Firefox 67 is in Nightly, and will move to Beta on March 18.
  • Firefox 66 is in Beta. The deadline for localization is March 5.
  • Firefox 66 will be released on March 19.

In terms of content, the priority currently remains on the profile-per-install feature already mentioned in the previous l10n report, and on the dev-l10n mailing list.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

This has been a rather quiet month in regards to mobile localization updates.

Teams are mostly heads-down working on kicking off the Fenix browser project.

In the meantime, other mobile apps are following their usual timelines and schedule –  so there is nothing much to call out this month.

Stay tuned for the next report, as we’ll have a few things in the pipeline to call out for sure!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org

We’ve added a new page ahead of the Firefox 66 release. Check in Pontoon and look for firefox/whatsnew_66.lang. To be part of the release, make sure to complete it by March 6. The demo URL is not ready at the moment. We will update you as soon as it becomes available.

A small but an important update is in the privacy/index.lang file. The change is urgent so please localize the string as soon as possible.

Have you taken a look of the newly designed navigation bar? It was recently rolled out with quite a bit of content to localize. Make it a high priority if it is not localized yet.

Common Voice

The team is super excited to launch the sentence collection tool! Though in Beta, it is fully functional. Moving forward, the site will be the place to submit, review and validate sentences in a more organized way and it is a lot easier for everyone, especially those who are not technical. Be sure to read the How To guide to make full use of the features. We want to thank all the key contributors who helped make the tool a reality.

Legal documents

Common Voice: The Privacy Notice and the Legal Terms have been updated in English. Only a select few languages are updated accordingly. These are the languages that have reached the threshold of collecting a minimum of 5000 sentences. If your community has  the bandwidth, feel free to review and make necessary suggestions. All these suggestions are subject to peer review before the corrections are published. These are the languages that are recently updated: Breton, Catalan, Chuvash, Dutch, Esperanto, German, French, Hakha Chin, Irish, Italian, Kabyle, Kyrgyz, Slovenian, Tatar, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Welsh.

Firefox Lite: We’ve added Traditional Chinese and Vietnamese to the Privacy Notice. Feel free to review the document and make necessary changes.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

The foundation’s impact goal — Better machine decision making — now has its public wiki page with a lot of resources explaining the Foundation’s goals and activities for 2019 and beyond. If you want to learn more about what MoFo is up to, this is a great way to dive in!

Fundraising

The fundraising team is starting to plan some mini-campaigns linked to specific events (the Internet Health Report publication, Fellowships, MozFest, and the traditional end-of-year fundraising) with the goal of explaining that Mozilla does much more than a browser and providing potential donors with a better understanding of the Foundation’s work.
We mentioned the new receipts in the previous L10N Report, those are still coming, they just needed further adjustments and another round of review from the Legal team. The team wants to get this right to have future-proof donation receipts.

Advocacy

The EU misinformation campaign has started! The survey mentioned last month went out, and on February 11th, the team sent an open letter to Facebook (simultaneously launched in English, French & German) asking for more transparency on political ads ahead of the EU elections. This letter was also signed by 38 partners including Access Now, Greenpeace and Reporters Without Borders.

Facebook responded in just a few hours, preventing us from publishing the open letter in more languages, but thanks to the dedication of localizers, the simultaneous launch in multiple languages has more than doubled the public engagement: while the team has sent more emails in English, engagement in the campaign in terms of clicks, open letter signatures and post-signing donations came primarily from localized emails in French and German! Mozilla has since responded to the announcement.

Next steps will be an opportunity to involve even more locales and will include launching a scorecard and an election bundle. Rooted in the principles outlined in the European Commission’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, the scorecard will compare how major social platforms are performing as they take steps to combat dis/misinformation.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

There have been some important changes in Mozilla staff since the last report.

We need your help to review the following articles:

  • In all the locales for Firefox 65 articles:

Want to follow the Firefox 66 modified articles to be published in the SUMO Discourse in the coming weeks?  Please subscribe to the tag.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

At the end of last year we held a community design sprint with aim of improving the review process in Pontoon. The proposed changes were mostly focused around one of the top requested features of Pontoon – translation comments.

The following product specification is a result of the design sprint. It defines the problem we’re solving, lists measurable goals we’d like to achieve, outlines the proposed solution and provides a rough timeline.

It’s a short, 7 minute read. Please have a look at it, or at least skim through the screenshot tour. As you’ll see, changes to the translate view are pretty substantial, so we’d like to hear your opinion. Either on Discourse or in the spec.

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.

A New Year with New Goals for Mozilla Localization

Jeff Beatty

No responses yet

 

We had a really ambitious and busy year in 2018! Thanks to the help of the global localization community as well as a number of cross-functional Mozilla staff, we were able to focus our efforts on improving the foundations of our localization program. These are some highlights of what we accomplished in 2018:

  • Fluent syntax stability.
  • New design for review process in Pontoon.
  • Continuous localization for Firefox desktop.
  • arewefluentyet.com
  • Formation of Mozilla Terminology Working Group for defining en-US source terms.
  • 8 community-organized workshops around the world.
  • Firefox Lite localization.
  • Research and recommendations for future international brand management.
  • Begun rewrite of Pontoon’s Translate view to React.
  • Clearly defined l10n community roles and their responsibilities.

Rather than plan out our goals for the full year in 2019, we’ve been encouraged to take it a quarter at a time. That being said, there are a number of interesting themes that will pop up in 2019 as well as the continuation of work from 2018:

Standardize & Scale

There are still areas within our tool-chain as well as our processes that make it hard to scale localization to all of Mozilla. Over the course of 2018 we saw more and more l10n requests from internal teams that required customized processes. The good news here is that the organization as a whole wants to localize more and more content (that hasn’t been true in the past)!

While we’ve seen success in standardizing the processes for localizing product user interfaces, we’ve struggled to rein in the customizations for other types of content. In 2019, we’ll focus a lot of our energy on bringing more stability and consistency to localizers by standardizing localization processes according to specific content types. Once standardized, we’ll be able to scale to meet the the needs of these internal teams while keeping the amount of new content to translate in consistent volumes.

Mobilize South East Asian Locales

One of the primary focus areas for all of Mozilla this year is South East Asian markets. The Emerging Markets team in Taipei is focused on creating products for those markets that meet the needs of users there, building on the success of Screenshots Go and Firefox Lite. This year we’ll see more products coming to these markets and it will be more important than ever for us to know how to mobilize l10n communities in those regions in order to localize these exciting, new products.

New Technologies

Early this year we plan to hit a major milestone: Fluent 1.0! This is the culmination of over a decade’s worth of work and we couldn’t be more proud of this accomplishment. Fluent will continue to be implemented in Firefox as well as other Mozilla projects throughout 2019. We’re planning a roadmap for an ecosystem of tooling to support Fluent 1.0 as well as exploring how to build a thriving Fluent community.

Pontoon’s Translate view rewrite to React will be complete and we’ll be implementing features for a newly redesigned review process. Internationalizing the Pontoon Translate UI will be a priority, as well as addressing some long-requested feature updates, like terminology support as well as improved community and user profile metrics.

Train the Trainers

In 2018 we published clear descriptions of the responsibilities and expectations of localizers in specific community roles. These roles are mirror images of Pontoon roles, as Pontoon is the central hub for localization at Mozilla. In 2019, we plan to organize a handful of workshops in the latter half of the year to train Managers on how to be effective leaders in their communities and reliable extensions of the l10n-drivers team. We would like to record at least one of these and make the workshop training available to everyone through the localizer documentation (or some other accessible place).

We aim to report on the progress of these themes throughout the year in quarterly reports. In each report, we’ll share the outcomes of the objectives of one quarter and describe the objectives for the next quarter. In Q1 of 2019 (January – March), the l10n-drivers will:

  • Announce release of Fluent 1.0 to the world
  • Standardize vendor localization process under separate, self-service tool-chain for vendor-sourced content types.
  • Standardize the way Android products are bootstrapped and localized
  • Know how to effectively mobilize South/East Asian communities
  • Transition mozilla.org away from .lang-based l10n infrastructure.
  • Port Pontoon’s translate view to React and internationalize it.

As always, if you have questions about any of these objectives or themes for 2019, please reach out to an l10n-driver, we’d be very happy to chat.

L10n report: January edition

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

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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

The localization cycle for Firefox 66 in Nightly is approaching its end, and Tuesday (Jan 15) was the last day to get changes into Firefox 65 before it moves to release (Jan 29). These are the key dates for the next cycle:

  • January 28: Nightly will be bumped to version 67.
  • February 26: deadline to ship updates to Beta (Firefox 66).

As of January, localization of the Pocket add-on has moved back into the Firefox main project. That’s a positive change for localization, since it gives us a clearer schedule for updates, while before they were complex and sparse. All existing translations from the stand-alone process were imported into Mercurial repositories (and Pontoon).

In terms of prioritization, there are a couple of features to keep an eye on:

  • Profile per installation: with Firefox 67, Firefox will begin using a dedicated profile for each Firefox version (including Nightly, Beta, Developer Edition, and ESR). This will make Firefox more stable when switching between versions on the same computer and will also allow you to run different Firefox installations at the same time. This introduces a set of dialogs and web pages to warn the user about the change, and explain how to sync data between profiles. Unlike other features, this targets all versions, but Nightly users in particular, since they are more likely to have multiple profiles according to Telemetry data. That’s a good reason to prioritize these strings.
  • Security error pages: nothing is more frustrating than being unable to reach a website because of certificate issues. There are a lot of experiments happening around these pages and the associated user experience, both in Beta and Release, so it’s important to prioritize translations for these strings (they’re typically in netError.dtd).

Continue reading …

L10n report: December edition

Jeff Beatty

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Hi everyone and welcome to the December 2018 Mozilla l10n report!

Before getting into the individual updates, I wanted to call out that the Mozilla All Hands was held last week in Orlando, FL. For our part, we made progress on conversations with different marketing groups, mozilla.org engineers, and Open Innovation about standardizing the l10n process for each of their types of content requiring translation. We also had a few cross-organization discussions about Fluent in Firefox and the Multilingual Firefox project. Plans for 2019, on an organization level, are still being finalized and are too early to share at the moment, but we look forward to opportunities to share those plans once they’re ready.

Thank you for a full year of donating your time to localize Mozilla projects. We’re incredibly grateful to get to work with you and look forward to accomplishing more together next year!

Welcome!

New localizers

  • Arabic: Tony Issa joined us through the Common Voice project.

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

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Firefox 64 has been officially released on December 11. As a localizer, it’s important to  remember that there’s a strict deadline to ship updates in the next official version of Firefox, and that’s about 2 weeks before the release date (Nov 27 for Firefox 64). The deadline to ship updates to translations in Firefox 65 will be January 15.

In general, the best approach is to localize Nightly periodically, and use Nightly in your daily browsing to test your work (it’s updated twice a day). If you can’t, then targeting the very beginning of the beta cycle is a good alternative, to leave a few weeks for testing on Beta, and get as many eyes as possible on the localized version.

As for Firefox 65 and 66, while the migration to Fluent proceeds, the main focus – and source of strings – still remains testing and improving tracking protection features and security error pages.

Firefox 65 will include an exciting and brand new feature for multilingual users, but we’ll talk about it in a dedicated blog post with all the details.

Continue reading …

Multilingual Gecko Status Update 2018.2

zbraniecki

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Welcome to the third edition of Multilingual Gecko Status Update!

In the previous update we covered the work which landed in Firefox 59 and Firefox 60.

At the time, we’ve been finalizing the platform work to support Fluent localization system, and we were in the middle of migration of the first Firefox UI component – Preferences – to it.

Today, we’ll pick up right where we left off!

Firefox 61 (June)

Firefox 61 fits into the trend of things calming down in Intl – and it’s a great news! It means that we are reaching platform maturity after all the groundbreaking refactors in 2017, and we all can focus on the work on top of the modules, rather than playing whack-a-mole fixing bugs and adding missing features.

The biggest platform change is really just an update to ICU 61 which Andre landed in March and my work on adding mozIntl.RelativeTimeFormat and mozIntl.getLocaleDisplayNames.

The former gave us a stable unified API for presenting relative time (such as “In 5 minutes” or “10 days ago”) while the latter unified how we present language, region and combinations of those in our user interface based on the Unicode CLDR representation (example: “English (United States)”).

As we explained in my earliest posts, one of the things we’re particularly proud of is that we go the extra mile to use every such opportunity to not only fix the immediate Firefox UI need, but also push such proposals for standardization and in result make the Web Platform more complete.

In this case, Intl.RelativeTimeFormat has been proposed and thanks to amazing work by Daniel Ehrenberg is now in Stage 3 and soon will be exposed to all web developers in all browsers! Intl.getLocaleDisplayNames is less mature but the work on it just picked up.

Firefox migration to Fluent reached its next milestone moving from just a couple messages to over 100 Fluent messages in Firefox!

Notable changes [intl module]:

Firefox 62 (September)

Another calm cycle! The biggest feature was the introduction of the pseudolocalization in Firefox which I blogged about, and landing of the developer documentation.

The documentation has been insanely useful in distributing knowledge and helping engineers feel more comfortable working with the new stack, and we’re very happy we reached a stage where landing a documentation is the big news 🙂

In the Fluent land we spent the March-May timeframe moving from a 100 messages to 500 Fluent messages in Firefox!

Notable changes [intl module]:

Firefox 63 (October)

This cycle was quite similar to the previous one, with a bulk of work going into regular maintenance and cleanups.

For my work, the trend is to start integrating Fluent deeper into Gecko with more work around L10nRegistry v1 limitations and getting deeper DOM integration to improve XUL performance.

In this cycle he landed a XPCOM mozIDOMLocalization API which allows us to call Fluent from C++ and was required for a bigger change that we landed in Firefox 64.

One new theme is Kris Maglione who started working on reducing the performance and memory overhead coming from the old StringBundle API (used for .properties). With all the new work centralized around Fluent, but with a large portion of our strings still using StringBundle, it becomes a great target for optimizations by cutting out everything we don’t use and now we know – we never will.

Notable changes [intl module]:

Firefox 64 (December)

This release, is still getting stabilized and will get released in December, but the work cycle on it happened between September and October, so we can already provide you an account of that work!

Besides of a regular stack of cleanups coming from Henri and me, we’ve seen Ehsan Akhgari taking over from Kris to remove more lines of unused code.

The really big change was the introduction of DocumentL10n API which is a C++ API with its own WebIDL tightly integrated into the very core of DOM module in Gecko – nsIDocument.

Before that Fluent lived in Gecko in some form of a glorified javascript library. While it is Fluent’s goal to target the web platform, Firefox UI is inherently different from the web content and benefits from better integration between the DOM and its localization component.

This change allowed us to better integrate localization into the document’s life cycle, but what’s even more important, it allowed us to expose Fluent to documents that usually do not have special privileges and could not access Fluent before.

As for migration, we moved along nicely bumping from 500 to around 800 messages thanks to hard work of a number of students mentored by Jared Wein and Gijs Kruitbosch. The students picked up work on the migration as their Capstone project.

Notable changes [intl module]:

Summary

2018 has been much “easier” for the intl module than 2017 was. It’s great to see the how all pieces fit together and for me personally, it enabled me to focus on getting Fluent better integrated into Gecko.

There’s still a lot of work but it now is fully focused on Fluent and localization, while our intl module as a whole goes through a more well earned peaceful period.

Between now and the next status update, we hope to publish a summary post about the last two years of work. Stay tuned!

L10n Report: November 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.

Hello everyone,

We would like to thank you for reading the l10n reports and keeping updated on what’s happening in the Mozilla l10n community. And we would also like to make it even better! If you have a few minutes before or after reading this month’s report, could you please take this short, anonymous survey?

Yes, I take the survey

Thank you, and enjoy this new report!

Welcome!

New localizers

Derek started contributing to Navajo locale for Focus Android project. Welcome Derek!

Almar and Valdimar just recently joined a community workshop in Iceland, and immediately started contributing to Icelandic locale. Welcome to you both, we are glad to have you on board!

Lobsang is not only a new contributor, he also kicked off localization for Tibetan locale! Focus for Android will be the first browser ever localized in Tibetan 🙂 Congrats and welcome!

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

New community/locales added

Navajo was just recently added to Pontoon.

Tibetan was also added to our localization effort.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Firefox 63 is currently available in release, while 64 is in beta, and 65 in Nightly. The last day available to ship updates for beta will be November 27.

Most of the strings landed towards the end of the Nightly cycle are still related to Privacy (Content Blocking, Trackers, etc.) and Security (certificate error pages), but there’s a also a new about:performance page, using Fluent for localization.

Talking about Fluent, as anticipated in the September edition of this report, expect a lot of strings moving to FTL files in the coming weeks. You can also visit arewefluentyet.com to visualize the work done around this area, and get an idea of how many strings are left.

A new project, strictly connected to Firefox, is also available in Pontoon for localization: Firefox Monitor. There are 2 distinct parts:

  • An add-on, which displays a notification (doorhanger) when you visit a website with known data breaches.
  • The actual website, monitor.firefox.com, and the text used to send emails to users.

Both projects are scheduled for launch in the first half of November.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

With version 63 slowly rolling out to users in the coming week, you will be now able to use Firefox for Android in English for Canada (en-CA) and Ligurian (lij) on the release version! Congratulations to those teams for completing and shipping this work.

We’ve also shipped Firefox for iOS v14 a few days ago, and the main new features are:

  • Siri shortcuts
  • Dark Theme improvements
  • Performance Improvements
  • Make Clear Private Data settings panel more granular

A new experiment just came out in Indonesia, and you can try it out too: ScreenshotGO. This project is shipping on Google Play in Indonesia only at the time, but you can give it a try by installing it from its GitHub project page. The main idea is to provide better screenshot management on Android devices. Users can add a “Go” button their device to speed up the taking of screenshots.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

Fundraising

The October fundraiser went out over the last few days and is doing pretty great so far, thanks a lot to everyone who contributed! It’s definitely helping the Foundation raise money to fund next year’s programs.

Fundraising email schedule for November and December is shaping up, starting on Giving Tuesday:

Email #1 Giving Tuesday (11/27)
Email #2 12/03
Email #3 12/17
Email #4 12/27
Email #5 – Mitchell message 12/31

It’s likely we will get help from a vendor for some of those emails, especially if the copy gets approved right before the holidays. Of course we will keep you updated.

Advocacy

The Advocacy team is working on test campaigns around misinformation and plan to launch one or two of them early this month. The campaigns can potentially be launched globally, but will always keep a focus on Europe. Markets and locales will heavily depend from the campaign targets.

The campaigns will have 3 main goals:

  • To grow public support and demand for policymakers to tackle misinformation with healthy internet policies.
  • To provide policymakers with a network of accessible experts and reliable information to help shape healthy internet policies.
  • To engage corporations and build industry allies to tackle this issue.

What’s new or coming up in Support

– New and updated Firefox 63 content awaits, giving your talent another chance to shine. Click the links below, see if your locale is waiting for your involvement and go for it!

– If you need an introduction or refresher on how localizing works for support.mozilla.org, please take a look at our step-by-step explanation (with videos).

– Warm thanks to the Bengali community for organizing a fun and exciting event that included localizing Support content.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

– Errors & Warnings. We launched support for Errors & Warnings in Pontoon, which allow you to easily identify and fix translations breaking Firefox builds or exceeding the length limit on Mozilla.org. Note that Warnings, unlike Errors, mean that we’re not completely sure that the string contains critical issues, so it might be OK to just leave them unchanged. For more details, check out the documentation or read more about Errors & Warnings and a handful of other novelties in Pontoon.

– Changing Machine Translation provider. We switched to Google Cloud Translation API as our machine translation provider. Previously, we used a free plan of Microsoft Translator Text API, which only worked with the old version of the API. That version is now being deprecated and lately started behaving unreliably, often not returning any results. One of the benefits of using Google Translate is that the number of Mozilla locales with machine translation support more than doubled (from 48 to 103).

Events

  • A workshop organized by the Mozilla Nativo community is about to kick-off in a few weeks in Oaxaca, from Nov 10-11.
  • Another community workshop is right around the corner: the South East Asia event will take place in Hanoi from Nov 17-18.
  • Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Reach out to any l10n-driver and we’ll include that (see links to emails at the bottom of this report)

 

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

Shout-out to Stoyan (one of our Bulgarian localizers) for working on a patch that adds several Firefox add-ons to help localizers test all permission strings. Update includes all recent webext permissions. Check it out here!

 

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

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.