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

13 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.

L10n Report: August Edition

Jeff Beatty

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:

  • Mohsin of Assanese (as) is committed to rebuild the community and has been contributing to several projects.
  • Emil of Syriac (syc) joined us through the Common Voice project.
  • Ratko and Isidora of Serbian (sr) have been prolific contributors to a wide range of products and projects since joining the community.
  • Haile of Amheric (am) joined us through the Common Voice project, is busy localizing and recruiting more contributors so he can rebuild the community.
  • Ahsun Mahmud of Bengali (bn) focuses his interest on Firefox.

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

New community/locales added

  • Maltese (mt)
  • Romansh Vallader (rm-vallery)
  • Syriac (syc)

Continue reading …

Q3 2019 objectives for Mozilla localization

Jeff Beatty

No responses yet

Every three months, the l10n-drivers dedicate a couple of weeks to review progress made on objectives from the past three months (or quarter) and plan new objectives for the next quarter. Historically, we haven’t published much about these objectives, but that’s something I intend to change with this blog post. Transparency is a priority to this team and as such, I plan to discuss more openly the non-confidential, ongoing work that the team is undertaking with each quarter.

Internally, we follow a goal-setting methodology known as OKR (Objective, Key Result). OKRs are intended to be set at each level of an organization. Team OKRs should naturally nest themselves into higher level OKRs. According to this methodology, a team identifies a vision statement (aka Objective) and then 2-5 metrics to determine whether that vision has been met (aka Key Results). Teams try to limit their Objectives to only 3-5 for a specified period of time (in our case, three months). Once these OKRs are set, the team undertakes various initiatives/projects to accomplish the metrics set in each Key Result.

Continue reading …

L10n report: July 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. 

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

  • Manx was added to Pontoon and they’re starting to work on localizing Firefox.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

As usual, let’s start with some important dates:

  • Firefox 68 will be released on July 9. At that point, Firefox 69 will be in beta, while Nightly will have Firefox 70.
  • The deadline to ship localization updates in Firefox 69 is August 20.

Firefox 69 has been a lightweight release in terms of new strings, with most of the changes coming from Developer Tools. Expect a lot more content in Firefox 70, with particular focus on the Password Manager – integrating most of the Lockwise add-on features directly into Firefox – and work around Tracking Protection and Security, with brand new about pages.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Since our last report, we’ve shipped the first release of Firefox Preview (Fenix) in 11 languages (including en-US). The next upcoming step will be to open up the project to more locales. If you are interested, make sure to follow closely the dev.l10n mailing list this week. And congratulations to the teams that helped make this a successful localized first release!

On another note, Firefox for iOS deadline for l10n work on v18 just passed this week, and we’re adding two new locales: Finnish and Gujarati. Congratulations to the teams!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Keep brand and product names in English

The current policy per branding and legal teams is that the trademarked names should be left unchanged. Unless indicated in the comments, brand names should be left in English, they cannot be transliterated or declined. If you have any doubt, ask through the available communication channels.

Product names such as Lockwise, Monitor, Send, and Screenshot, to name a few, used alone or with Firefox, should be left unchanged. Common Voice is also a product name and should remain unchanged. Pocket is a trademark and must remain as is too. Locale managers, please inform the rest of the communities on the policy especially to new contributors. Search in Pontoon or Transvision for these names and revert them to English.

Mozilla.org

The recently added new pages contain marketing languages to promote all the Firefox products. Localize them and start spreading the words on social media and other platforms. The deadline is indicative.

  • New: firefox/best-browser.lang, firefox/campaign-trailhead.lang, firefox/all-unified.lang;
  • Update: firefox/accounts-2019.lang;
  • Obsolete: firefox/accounts.lang will be removed soon. Stop working on this page if is incomplete.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

Newly published localizer facing documentation

The Firefox marketing guides are living documents and will be updated as needed.

  • The guide in German was written by Mozilla staff copywriter. It sets the tone for marketing content localization, including the mozilla.org site. With this guide, the hope is that the site has a more unified tone from page to page, regardless of who contributed to the localization: the community or a staff.
  • The guide in English was derived from the guide written in German and is meant to be a template for any communities who want to create a marketing content localization guide. This is in addition to the style guide a community has already created.
  • The guide in French will be authored by a Mozilla staff copywriter. We will update you in a future report.

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)

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: May 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!

New localizers

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

New community/locales added

  • Bashkirs (ba), a Turkic language mostly spoken in Russia

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Firefox 68 has officially entered Beta. The deadline to ship localization updates into this version is June 25. It’s important to remember that 68 is going to be an ESR version too: if your localization is incomplete on Jun 26, or contains errors, it won’t be possible to fix them later on for ESR.

A lot of content has landed in Firefox 68 towards the end of the cycle. In particular, make sure to test the new stub installer in the coming weeks, and the redesigned about:welcome experience. Detailed instructions are available in this thread on dev-l10n. You should also check out this post on how to localize the new “Join Firefox” message.

Partially related to Firefox Desktop: Facebook Container is quickly approaching version 2.0, adding several informative panels to the initial bare UI.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

As promised, more new and exciting things are happening in mobile land since our last report.

In fact, we have recently enabled two new projects in Pontoon, since we are opening up localization of a new password management product for both Android and iOS: Lockwise for Android (strings are located inside the locale folders, with a path starting by mozilla-mobile/lockwise-android/) and Lockwise for iOS – both formerly known as “Lockbox”. Ideal deadline for localizing and testing these projects is May 27th. As for previously enabled mobile projects, we are only exposing these strings to a subset of locales for now. We’ll add more locales as we get a handle on this first batch.

For Fenix and android-components strings, the current deadline for localizing and testing is still June 13th.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Version 2 of the Firefox Monitor website is launching in the coming days. It’s a complete redesign, that will allow users to sign up with their Firefox Account, and monitor multiple emails easily.

Firefox Accounts: many strings were added in the recent feature updates. Please check Pontoon for the deadline. There might be more strings to be added before the weekend. The team will push codes more regularly to include as much localized content as possible on production before the launch of the new feature.

Mozilla.org added and updated four files in the past week: firefox/accounts-2019.lang, firefox/new/trailhead.lang, firefox/whatsnew_67.0.5.lang, and mozorg/newsletters.lang. Follow the deadline and prioritize against other requests.

Events

  • The Thai community meetup took place in Bangkok on 18-19 of May. This was the first localization meetup of the year led by the l10n-drivers. Community manager Vee summarized well through this blog.
  • 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

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: 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]

5 responses

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.