October 2021 Report

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 l10n-driver

Welcome eemeli, our new l10n-driver! He will be working on Fluent and Pontoon, and is part of our tech team along with Matjaž. We hope we can all connect soon so you can meet him.

New localizers

Katelem from Obolo locale. Welcome to localization at Mozilla!

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

New community/locales added

Obolo (ann) locale was added to Pontoon.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

A new major release (MR2) is coming for Firefox desktop with Firefox 94. The deadline to translate content for this version, currently in Beta, is October 24.

While MR2 is not as content heavy as MR1, there are changes to very visible parts of the UI, like the onboarding for both new and existing users. Make sure to check out the latest edition of the Firefox L10n Newsletter for more details, and instructions on how to test.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Focus for Android and iOS have gone through a new refresh! This was done as part of our ongoing MR2 work – which has also covered Firefox for Android and iOS. You can read about all of this here.

Many of you have been heavily involved in this work, and we thank you for making this MR2 launch across all mobile products such a successful release globally.

We are now starting our next iteration of MR2 releases. We are still currently working on scoping out the mobile work for l10n, so stay tuned.

One thing to note is that the l10n schedule dates for mobile should now be aligned across product operating systems: one l10n release cycle for all of android, and another release cycle for all of iOS. As always, Pontoon deadlines remain your source of truth for this.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Firefox Accounts

Firefox Accounts team has been working on transitioning Gettext to Fluent. They are in the middle of migrating server.po to auth.ftl, the component that handles the email feature. Unlike previous migrations where the localized strings were not part of the plan, this time, the team wanted to include them as much as possible. The initial attempt didn’t go as planned due to multiple technical issues. The new auth.ftl file made a brief appearance in Pontoon and is now disabled. They will give it a go after confirming that the identified issues were addressed and tested.

Legal docs

All the legal docs are translated by our vendor. Some of you have reported translation errors or they are out of sync with the English source. If you spot any issues, wrong terminology, typo, missing content, to name a few, you can file a bug. Generally we do not encourage localizers to provide translations because of the nature of the content. If they are minor changes, you can create a PR and ask for a peer review to confirm your change before the change can be merged. If the overall quality is bad, we will request the vendor to change the translators.

Please note, the locale support for legal docs varies from product to product. Starting this year, the number of supported locales also has decreased to under 20. Some of the previously localized docs are no longer updated. This might be the reason you see your language out of sync with the English source.

Mozilla.org

Five more mobile specific pages were added since our last report. If you need to prioritize them, please give higher priority to the Focus, Index and Compare pages.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

Lots of new stuff since our last update here in June. Here are some of the highlights:

• We’re working on refreshing the onboarding experience in SUMO. The content preparation has mostly done in Q3 and the implementation is expected in this quarter before the end of the year.
• Catch up on what’s new in our support platform by reading our release notes in Discourse. One highlight of the past quarter is that we integrated Zendesk form for Mozilla VPN into SUMO. We don’t have the capability to detect subscriber at the moment, so everyone can file a ticket now. But we’re hoping to add the capability for that in the future.
• Firefox Focus joined our forces in Play Store support. Contributors should be able to reply to Google Play Store reviews for Firefox Focus from Conversocial now. We also create this guideline to help contributors compose a reply for Firefox Focus reviews.
• We welcomed 2 new team members in Q3. Joe who is our Support Operation Manager is now taking care of the premium customer support experience. And Abby, the new Content Manager, is our team’s latest addition who will be working closely with Fabi and our KB contributors to improve our help content.

You’re always welcome to join our Matrix or the contributor forum to talk more about anything related to support!

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Submit your ideas and report bugs via GitHub

We have enabled GitHub Issues in the Pontoon repository and made it the new place for tracking bugs, enhancements and tasks for Pontoon development. At the same time, we have disabled the Pontoon Component in Bugzilla, and imported all open bugs into GitHub Issues. Old bugs are still accessible on their existing URLs. For reporting security vulnerabilities, we’ll use a newly created component in Bugzilla, which allows us to hide security problems from the public until they are resolved.

Using GitHub Issues will make it easier for the development team to resolve bugs via commit messages and put them on a Roadmap, which will also be moved to GitHub soon. We also hope GitHub Issues will make suggesting ideas and reporting issues easier for the users. Let us know if you run into any issues or have any questions!

More improvements to the notification system coming

As part of our H1 effort to better understand how notifications are being used, the following features have received most votes in a localizer survey:

• Notifications for new strings should link to the group of strings added.
• For translators and locale managers, get notifications when there are pending suggestions to review.
• Add the ability to opt-out of specific notifications.

Thanks to eemeli, the first item was resolved back in August. The second feature has also been implemented, which means reviewers will receive weekly notifications about newly created unreviewed suggestions within the last week. Work on the last item – ability to opt-out of specific notification types – has started.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

We published two new posts in the Localization category on Discourse:

• Information that you should know before requesting new projects, mostly targeted at new or smaller languages. This post explains which projects are a good fit for these locales, and which aren’t.
• More detailed information about requesting Firefox desktop as a new project.

Events

• Michal Stanke shared his experience as a volunteer in the open source community at the annual International Translation Day event hosted by WordPress! Way to go!
• 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)

Useful Links

• #l10n-community channel on Element (chat.mozilla.org)
• Localization category on Discourse
• Twitter
• L10n blog

Questions? Want to get involved?

• If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:
  • Delphine – l10n Project Manager for mobile
  • Peiying (CocoMo) – l10n Project Manager for mozilla.org, marketing, and legal
  • Francesco Lodolo (flod) – l10n Project Manager for desktop
  • Théo Chevalier – l10n Project Manager for Mozilla Foundation
  • Matjaž – Pontoon dev

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.

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

• Sirus of Nias (nia)

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

New community/locales added

• nia

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

In terms of new content, it’s been a pretty calm period for Firefox after the MR1 release, with less than 50 strings added over the last 6 weeks. We expect that to change in the coming weeks, starting with a few clean-ups that didn’t land in time for MR1, and brand new features.

These are the relevant deadlines for the next month:

• Firefox 91 shipped last Tuesday (August 10), and we welcomed a new locale with it: Scots.
• The deadline to localize Firefox 92 is August 29 (release will happen on September 7), while Firefox 93 just started its life cycle in Nightly.

A reminder that Firefox 91 is also the new ESR, and will be supported for about 1 year. We plan to update localizations for 91 ESR in a few weeks, to improve coverage and pick up some bug fixes.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

We have exciting news coming up on the mobile front. In case you haven’t heard yet, we just brought back Focus for iOS and Focus for Android to Pontoon for localization. We are eager to bring back these products to a global audience with updated translations!

Both Focus for Android and Focus for iOS should have all strings in by August 17th. L10n deadline for both localizing and testing your work is September 6th. One difference you will notice is that iOS strings will be trickling in regularly – vs what we usually do for Firefox for iOS where you get all strings in one bulk.

Concerning Firefox for Android and Firefox for iOS: both projects are going to start landing strings for the next release, which promises to be a very interesting one. More info to come soon, please stay tuned on Matrix and Discourse for this!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

mozilla.org

A set of VPN pages were landed recently.  As the Mozilla VPN product expands to more markets, it would be great to get these pages localized. Do plan to take some time and work as a team to complete 4000+ words of new content. The pages contain some basic information on what distinguishes Mozilla’s VPN from others on the market. You will find it useful to spread the words and promote the product in your language.

There will be a couple of new projects on the horizon. Announcements will be made through  Discourse and Matrix.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

• Mobile documentation has 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)

Opportunities

International Translation Day

Call for community translator or manager as a panelist to represent the Mozilla l10n community:

As part of Translation Day 2021, the WordPress Polyglots team is organizing a handful of global events (in English) from Sept. 17 – 30, 2021. The planning team is still deciding on the format and dates for these events, but they will be virtual/online and accessible to anyone who’s interested. One of the events the team is putting together is a panel discussion between contributors from multiple open source or community-led translation projects. If you or anyone in your community would be interested in talking about your experience as a community translator and how translations work in your community or project, you would be a great fit!

Check out what the organizer and the communities were able to accomplish last year and what they are planning for this year. The panel discussion would involve localization contributors like you from other open source communities, sharing their experiences on the tools, process and creative ways to collaborate during the pandemic. We hope some of you can take the opportunity to share and learn.

Even if you are not able to participate in the event, maybe you can organize a virtual meeting within the community, meet and greet and celebrate this special day together.

Friends of the Lion

• Congratulations to Temitope Olajide from the Yoruba l10n community, for your excellent job completing the Terminology project!

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

Useful Links

• #l10n-community channel on Element (chat.mozilla.org)
• Localization category on Discourse
• Twitter
• L10n blog

Questions? Want to get involved?

• If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:
  • Delphine – l10n Project Manager for mobile
  • Peiying (CocoMo) – l10n Project Manager for mozilla.org, marketing, and legal
  • Francesco Lodolo (flod) – l10n Project Manager for desktop
  • Théo Chevalier – l10n Project Manager for Mozilla Foundation
  • Matjaž – Pontoon dev

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.

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

Firefox 89 (MR1)

On June 1st, Mozilla released Firefox 89. That was a major milestone for Firefox, and a lot of work went into this release (internally called MR1, which stands for Major Release 1). If this new update was well received — see for example this recent article from ZDNet — it’s also thanks to the amazing work done by our localization community.

For the first time in over a decade, we looked at Firefox holistically, making changes across the board to improve messages, establish a more consistent tone, and modernize some dialogs. This inevitably generated a lot of new content to localize.

Between November 2020 and May 2021, we added 1637 strings (6798 words). To get a point of reference, that’s almost 14% of the entire browser. What’s amazing is that the completion levels didn’t fall drastically:

• Nov 30, 2020: 89.03% translated across all shipping locales, 99.24% for the top 15 locales.
• May 24, 2021: 87.85% translated across all shipping locales, 99.39% for the top 15 locales.

The completion level across all locales is lower, but that’s mostly due to locales that are completely unmaintained, and that we’ll likely need to drop from release later this year. If we exclude those 7 locales, overall completion increased by 0.10% (to 89.84%).

Once again, thanks to all the volunteers who contributed to this successful release of Firefox.

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

These are the important deadlines for Firefox 90, currently in Beta:

• Firefox 90 will be released on July 13. It will be possible to update localizations until July 4.
• Firefox 91 will move to beta on July 12 and will be released on August 10.

Keep in mind that Firefox 91 is also going to be the next ESR version. Once that moves to release, it won’t generally be possible to update translations for that specific version.

Talking about Firefox 91, we’re planning to add a new locale: Scots. Congratulations to the team for making it so quickly to release!

On a final note, expect to see more updates to the Firefox L10n Newsletter, since this has proved to be an important tool to provide more context to localizers, and help them with testing.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Next l10n deadlines for mobile projects:

• Firefox for Android v91: July 12
• Firefox for iOS v34.1: June 9

Once more, we want to thank all the localizers who worked hard for the MR1 (Proton) mobile release. We really appreciate the time and effort spent on helping ensure all these products are available globally (and of course, also on desktop). THANK YOU!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

AMO

There are a few strings exposed to Pontoon that do not require translation. Only Mozilla staff in the admin role to the product would be able to see them. The developer for the feature will add a comment of “no need to translate” or context to the string at a later time. We don’t know when this will be added. For the time being, please ignore them. Most of the strings with a source string ID of src/olympia/scanners/templates/admin/* can be ignored. However, there are still a handful of strings that fall out of the category.

MDN

The project continues to be on hold in Pontoon. The product repository doesn’t pick up any changes made in Pontoon, so fr, ja, zh-CN, and zh-TW are now read-only for now.  The MDN site, however, is still maintaining the articles localized in these languages plus ko, pt-BR, and ru.

Mozilla.org

The websites in ar, hi-IN, id, ja, and ms languages are now fully localized through vendor service since our last report. Communities of these languages are encouraged to help promote the sites through various social media platforms to  increase download, conversion and create new profiles.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

Lots of exciting things happening in SUMO in Q2. Here’s a recap of what’s happening:

• You can now subscribe to Firefox Daily Digest to get updates about what people are saying about Firefox and other Mozilla products on social media like Reddit and Twitter.
• We now have release notes for Kitsune in Discourse. The latest one was about advanced search syntax which is a replacement for the former Advanced Search feature.
• We are trying something new for Firefox 89 by collecting MR1 (Major Release 1) specific feedback from across channels (support forum, Twitter, and Reddit). You can look into how we’re doing it on the contributor thread and learn more about MR1 changes from a list that we put together on this spreadsheet.

As always, feel free to join SUMO Matrix room to discuss or just say hi to the rest of the community.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Since May, we’ve been running experiments in Pontoon to increase the number of users reading notifications. For example, as part of this campaign, you might have seen a banner encouraging you to install the Pontoon Add-on — which you really should do — or noticed a slightly different notification icon in the top right corner of the window.

Recently, we also sent an email to all Pontoon accounts active in the past 2 years, with a link to a survey specifically about further improving notifications. If you haven’t completed the survey yet, or haven’t received the email, you can still take the survey here (until June 20th).

Look out for pilcrows

When a source string includes line breaks, Pontoon will show a pilcrow character (¶) where the line break happens.

This is how the Fluent file looks like:

onboarding-multistage-theme-tooltip-automatic-2 =
    .title =
        Inherit the appearance of your operating
        system for buttons, menus, and windows.

While in most cases the line break is not relevant — it’s just used to make the source file more readable — double check the resource comment: if the line break is relevant, it will be pointed out explicitly.

If they’re not relevant, you can just put your translation on one line.

If you want to preserve the line breaks in your translation, you have a few options:

• Use SHIFT+ENTER to create a new line while translating.
• Click the ¶ character in the source: that will create a new line in the position where your cursor currently sits.
• Use the COPY button to copy the source, then edit it. That’s not really efficient, as your locale might need a line break in a different place.

Do not select the text with your mouse, and copy it in the translation field. That will copy the literal character in the translation, and it will be displayed in the final product, causing bugs.

If you see the ¶ character in the translation field (see red arrow in the image below), it will also appear in the product you are translating, which is most likely not what you want. On the other hand, it’s expected to see the ¶ character in the list of translations under the translation field (green arrow), as it is in the source string and the string list.

Events

• We have held our first Localization Workshop Zoom event on Saturday June 5th. Next iterations will happen on Friday June 11th and Saturday June 12th. We have invited active managers and translators from a subset of locales. If this experience turns out to be useful, we will consider opening up to an even larger audience with expanded locales.
• 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

• #l10n-community channel on Element (chat.mozilla.org)
• Localization category on Discourse
• Twitter
• L10n blog

Questions? Want to get involved?

• If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:
  • Delphine – l10n Project Manager for mobile
  • Peiying (CocoMo) – l10n Project Manager for mozilla.org, marketing, and legal
  • Francesco Lodolo (flod) – l10n Project Manager for desktop
  • Théo Chevalier – l10n Project Manager for Mozilla Foundation
  • Matjaž – Pontoon dev

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.

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

• Mayuri and Roshan of Marathi (mr)
• Gheyret, Rustam, and osmanjan of Uyghur (ug) are getting close to completing the Common Voice site localization
• George of Swahili (sw)
• Joshua and pqpqlv of Papiamento (Aruba) (pap-AW)

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

New community/locales added

• Cebuano (ceb)
• Hiligaynon (hil)
• Meiteilon (mni)
• Papiamento (pap-AW)
• Shilha (shi)
• Somali (so)
• Uyghur (ug)

Update on the communication channels

On April 3rd, as part of a broader strategy change at Mozilla, we moved our existing mailing lists (dev-l10n, dev-l10n-web, dev-l10n-new-locales) to Discourse. If you are involved in localization, please make sure to create an account on Discourse and set up your profile to receive notifications when there are new messages in the Localization category.

We also decided to shut down our existing Telegram channel dedicated to localization. This was originally created to fill a gap, given its broad availability on mobile, and the steep entry barrier required to use IRC. In the meantime, IRC has been replaced by chat.mozilla.org, which offers a much better experience on mobile platforms. Please make sure to check out the dedicated Wiki page with instructions on how to connect, and join our #l10n-community room.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

For all localizers working on Firefox, there is now a Firefox L10n Newsletter, including all information regarding the next major release of Firefox (89, aka MR1). Here you can find the latest issue, and you can also subscribe to this thread in discourse to receive a message every time there’s an update.

One important update is that the Firefox 89 cycle will last 2 extra weeks in Beta. These are the important deadlines:

• Firefox 89 will move from Nightly to Beta on April 19 (unchanged).
• It will be possible to update localizations for Firefox 89 until May 23 (previously May 9).
• Firefox 89 will be released on June 1.

As a consequence, the Nightly cycle for Firefox 90 will also be two weeks longer.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Like Firefox desktop, Firefox for iOS and Firefox for Android are still on the road to the MR1 release. I’ve published some details on Discourse here. Dates and info are still relevant, nothing changes in terms of l10n.

All strings for Firefox for iOS should already have landed.

Most strings for Firefox for Android should have landed.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

AMO:

The Voice Fill and Firefox Voice Beta extensions are being retired.

Common Voice:

The project is transitioning to Mozilla Foundation. The announcement was made earlier this week. Some of the Mozilla staff who worked closely with the project will continue working on it in their new roles. The web part, the part that contributes to the site localization will remain in Pontoon.

Firefox Accounts:

Beta was launched on March 17. The sprint cycle is now aligned with Firefox Nightly moving forward. The next code push will be on April 21. The cutoff to include localized strings is a week earlier than the code push date.

MDN:

All locales are disabled with the exception of fr, ja, zh-CN and zh-TW. There is a blog on this decision. The team may add back more languages later. If it does happen, the attributes to the work done by community members will be retained in Pontoon. Nothing will be lost.

Mozilla.org:

• Migration from .lang to .ftl has completed. The strings containing brand and product names that were not converted properly will appear as warnings and would not be shown on the production site. Please resolve these issues as soon as possible.
• A select few locales are chosen to be supported by vendor service: ar, hi-IN, id, ja, and ms. The community managers were reached out for this change. The website should be fully localized in these languages by the first week of May. For more details on this change and for ways to report translation issues, please check out the announcement on Discourse.

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

• #l10n-community channel on Element (chat.mozilla.org)
• Localization category on Discourse
• Twitter
• L10n blog

Questions? Want to get involved?

• If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:
  • Delphine – l10n Project Manager for mobile
  • Peiying (CocoMo) – l10n Project Manager for mozilla.org, marketing, and legal
  • Francesco Lodolo (flod) – l10n Project Manager for desktop
  • Théo Chevalier – l10n Project Manager for Mozilla Foundation
  • Matjaž – Pontoon dev
  • Jeff Beatty (gueroJeff) – l10n-drivers manager

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

Welcome!

New localizers

• Ibrahim of Hausa (ha) drove the Common Voice web part to completion shortly after he joined the community.
• Crowdsource Kurdish, and Amed of Kurmanji Kurdish (kmr) teamed up to finish the Common Voice site localization.
• Saltykimchi of Malay (ms) joins us from the Common Voice community.
• Ibrahimi of Pashto (ps) completed the Common Voice site localization in a few days!
• Reem of Swahili (sw) has been laser focused on the Terminology project.

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

New community/locales added

• Mossi (mos)
• Pashto (ps)

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

First of all, let’s all congratulate the Silesian (szl) team for making their way into the official builds of Firefox. After spending several months in Nightly, they’re now ready for general audience and will ride the trains to Beta and Release with Firefox 87.

Upcoming deadlines:

• Firefox 86 is currently in Beta and will be released on February 23. The deadline to update localizations is on February 14.
• Firefox 87 is in Nightly and will move to Beta on February 22.

This means that, as of February 23, we’ll be only two cycles away from the next big release of Firefox (89), which will include the UI redesign internally called Proton. Several strings have already been exposed for localization, and you can start testing them – always in a new profile! – by manually setting these preferences to true in about:config:

• browser.proton.appmenu.enabled
• browser.proton.enabled
• browser.proton.tabs.enabled

It’s a constant work in progress, so expect the UI to change frequently, as new elements are added every few days.

One important thing to note: English will change several elements of the UI from Title Case to Sentence case. These changes will not require locales to retranslate all the strings, but it also expects each locale to have clearly defined rules in their style guides about the correct capitalization to use for each part of the UI. If your locale is following the same capitalization rules as en-US, then you’ll need to manually change these strings to match the updated version.

We’ll have more detailed follow-ups in the coming week about Proton, highlighting the key areas to test. In the meantime, make sure that your style guides are in good shape, and get in touch if you don’t know how to work on them in GitHub.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

You may have noticed some changes to the Firefox for Android (“Fenix”) release schedule – that affects in turn our l10n schedule for the project.

In fact, Firefox for Android is now mirroring the Firefox Desktop schedule (as much as possible). While you will notice that the Pontoon l10n deadlines are not quite the same between Firefox Android and Firefox Desktop, their release cadence will be the same, and this will help streamline our main products.

Firefox for iOS remains unchanged for now – although the team is aiming to streamline the release process as well. However, this also depends on Apple, so this may take more time to implement.

Concerning the Proton redesign (see section above about Desktop), we still do not know to what extent it will affect mobile. Stay tuned!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Firefox Accounts:

The payment settings feature is going to be updated later this month through a Beta release. It will be open for localization at a later date. Stay tuned!

mozilla.org

Migration to Fluent format continues, and the webdev team aims at wrapping up migration by the end of February. Kindly remind all the communities to check the migrated files for warnings, fix them right away. Otherwise, the strings will appear in English in an activated page on production. Or the page may resort to English because it can’t meet the activation threshold of 80% completion. Please follow the priority of the pages and work through them one at a time.

Common Voice

The project will be moved to Mozilla Foundation later this year. More details will be shared as soon as they become available.

Fairly small release as the transition details are being finalized.

• Fixed bug where “Voices Online” wasn’t tracking activity anymore
• Redirected language request modal to Github issue template
• Updated average seconds based on corpus 6.1
• Increased leaderboards “load more” function from 5 additional records to 20
• Localization/sentence updates

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

Since the beginning of 2021, SUMO has been supporting Firefox 85. You can see the full list of articles that we added and updated for Firefox 85 in the SUMO Sprint wiki page here.

We also have good news from the Dutch team who’s been changing their team formation and finally managed to localize 100% support articles in SUMO. This is a huge milestone for the team, who has been a little bit behind in the past couple of years.

There are a lot more interesting changes coming up in our pipeline. Feel free to join SUMO Matrix room to discuss or just say hi.

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

• The Friesian (fy-NL) community hit the national news with the Voice Challenge, thanks to Wim for leading the effort. It was a competition between Friesian and Dutch languages, a campaign to encourage more people to donate their voices through different platforms and capture the broadest demographics. The ultimate goal is to collect about 300 hours of Frisian text.
• Dutch team (nl) in SUMO, especially Tim Maks, Wim Benes, Onno Ekker, and Mark Heijl for completing 100% localization of the support articles in SUMO.

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

• #l10n-community channel on Matrix
• Dev.l10n mailing list and Dev.l10n.web mailing list – where project updates happen. If you are a localizer, then you should be following this
• Twitter
• Telegram (contact one of the l10n-drivers below so we will add you)
• L10n blog

Welcome!

New localizers

• Emmanuel of Basaa
• Alejandro, Manuel, and Sergio of Galician

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

New community/locales added

• Basaa (bas)
• Cantonese (yue)

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Upcoming deadlines:

• Firefox 85 is currently in beta and will be released on January 26. The deadline to update localization is on January 17 (see this older l10n report to understand why it moved closer to the release date).

As anticipated in the last report, this release cycle is longer than usual (6 weeks instead of 4), to accommodate for the end of year holidays in Europe and the US.

The number of new strings remains pretty low, but expect this to change during the first half of 2021, when we should have new content, thanks to a mix of new features and old interfaces revisited. There will also be changes to improve consistency around the use of Title Case and Sentence case for English. This won’t result in new strings to translate for other locales, but it’s a good reminder that each locale should set and follow its own rules, and they should be documented in style guides.

Since we’re at the end of year, here are a few numbers for Firefox:

• We currently ship Firefox in 96 languages. You should be proud of that accomplishment, since it makes Firefox the most widely localized browser on the market [1].
• Nightly ships with 10 additional locales. Some of them are very close to shipping in stable builds, hopefully that will happen in 2021.

[1] Disclaimer: other browsers make it quite difficult to understand which languages are effectively supported (there’s no way to switch language, and they don’t necessarily work in the open). Other vendors seem to also have a low entry barrier when it comes to adding a new language, and listing it as available. On the other hand, at Mozilla we require high priority parts to be completely translated, or very close, and a sustainable community before shipping.

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