L10n Report: September 2020 Edition

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

No responses yet

Welcome!

New localizers

  • Victor and Orif are teaming up to re-build the Tajik community.
  • Théo of Corsican (co).
  • Jonathan of Luganda (lg).
  • Davud of Central Kurdish (ckb).

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

Infrastructure and l10n.mozilla.org

As part of the effort to streamline and rationalize the localization infrastructure, following the recent lay-offs, we have decided to decommission Elmo. Elmo is the project name of what has been the backbone of our localization infrastructure for over 10 years, and its public facing part was hosted on l10n.mozilla.org (el as in “el-10-en (l10n)”, m(ozilla), o(rg) = elmo).

The practical consequences of this change are:

  • There are no more sign-offs for Firefox. Beta builds are going to use the latest content available in the l10n repositories at the time of the build.
  • The deadline for localization moves to the Monday before Release Candidate week. That’s 8 days before release day, and 5 full more days available for localization compared to the previous schedule. For reference, the deadline will be set to the day before in Pontoon (Sunday), since the actual merge happens in the middle of the day on Monday.
  • https://l10n.mozilla.org will be redirected to https://pontoon.mozilla.org/ (the 400 – Bad Gateway error currently displayed is a known problem).

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Upcoming deadlines:

  • Firefox 82 is currently in beta and will be released on October 20th. The deadline to update localization is on October 11 (see above to understand why it moved closer to the release date).

As you might have noticed, the number of new strings in Firefox has significantly decreased, with DevTools becoming less actively developed. Now more than ever it’s a good time to:

  • Test your builds.
  • Review pending suggestions in Pontoon for your locale, in Firefox but also other projects. Firefox alone has currently over 12 thousand suggestions pending across teams, with several locales well over 500 unreviewed suggestions.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

This last month, as announced – and as you have probably noticed – we have been reducing the number, and priority, of mobile products to localize. We are now focusing much more on Firefox for Android and Firefox for iOS – our original flagship products for mobile. Please thus refer to the “star” metric on Pontoon to prioritize your work for mobile.

The Firefox for Android schedule from now on should give two weeks out of four for localization work – as it did for Focus. This means strings will be landing during two weeks in Pontoon – and then you will have two weeks to work on those strings so they can make it into the next version. Check the deadline section in Pontoon to know when the l10n deadline for the next release is.

Concerning iOS: with iOS 14 we can now set Firefox as default! Thanks to everyone who has helped localize the new strings that will enable globally this functionality.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Common Voice

The support will continue with reduced staff. Though there won’t be new features introduced in the next six months, the team is still committed to fixing high priority bugs, adding newly requested languages, and releasing updated dataset. It will take longer to implement than before. Please follow the project’s latest update on Discourse.

WebThings Gateway

The project is being spun out of Mozilla as an independent open source project. It will be renamed from Mozilla WebThings to WebThings and will be moved to a new home at webthings.io. For other FAQ, please check out here. When the transition is complete, we will update everyone as soon as it becomes available.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

It would be great to get the following articles localized in Indonesian in the upcoming release for Firefox for iOS:

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

  • Mentions. We have added the ability to mention users in comments. After you type @ followed by any character, a dropdown will show up allowing you to select users from the list using Tab, Enter or mouse. You can narrow down the list by typing more characters. Kudos to April who has done an excellent job from the design and research phase all the way to implementing the final details of this feature!Screenshot of Pontoon, showing the new "mentions" feature
  • Download Terminology and TM from dashboards. Thanks to our new contributor Anuj Pandey you can now download TBX and TMX files directly from Team and Localization dashboards, without needing to go to the Translate page. Anuj also fixed two other bugs that will make the Missing translation status more noticeable and remove hardcoded @mozilla.com email addresses from the codebase.

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 2020 Edition

Théo Chevalier

2 responses

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

As you are probably aware, Mozilla just went through a massive round of layoffs. About 250 people were let go, reducing the overall size of the workforce by a quarter. The l10n-drivers team was heavily impacted, with Axel Hecht (aka Pike) leaving the company.

We are still in the process of understanding how the reorganization will affect our work and the products we localize. A first step was to remove some projects from Pontoon, and we’ll make sure to communicate any further changes in our communication channels.

Telegram channel and Matrix

The “bridge” between our Matrix and Telegram channel, i.e. the tool synchronizing content between the two, has been working only in one direction for a few weeks. For this reason, and given the unsupported status of this tool, we decided to remove it completely.

As of now:

  • Our Telegram and Matrix channels are completely independent from each other.
  • The l10n-community channel on Matrix is the primary channel for synchronous communications. The reason for this is that Matrix is supported as a whole by Mozilla, offering better moderation options among other things, and can be easily accessed from different platforms (browser, phone).

If you haven’t used Matrix yet, we encourage you to set it up following the instructions available in the Mozilla Wiki. You can also set an email address in your profile, to receive notifications (like pings) when you’re offline.

We plan to keep the Telegram channel around for now, but we might revisit this decision in the future.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Upcoming deadlines:

  • Firefox 81 is currently in beta and will be released on September 22nd. The deadline to update localization is on September 8.

In terms of content and new features, most of the changes are around the new modal print preview, which can be currently tested on Nightly.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

The new Firefox for Android has been rolled out at 100%! You should therefore have either been upgraded from the older version (or will be in just a little bit) – or you can download it directly from the Play Store here.

Congratulations to everyone who has made this possible!

For the next Firefox for Android release, we are expecting string freeze to start towards the end of the week, which will give localizers two weeks to complete localizing and testing.

Concerning Firefox for iOS: v29 strings have been exposed on Pontoon. We are still working out screenshots for testing with iOS devs at the moment, but these should be available soon and as usual from the Pontoon project interface.

On another note, and as mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, due to the recent lay-offs, we have had to deactivate some projects from Pontoon. The mobile products are currently: Scryer, Firefox Lite and Lockwise iOS. More may be added to this list soon, so stay tuned. Once more, thanks to all the localizers who have contributed their time and effort to these projects across the years. Your help has been invaluable for Mozilla.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Common Voice

The Common Voice team is greatly impacted due to the changes in recent announcement. The team has stopped the two-week sprint cycle and is working in a maintenance mode right now. String updates and new language requests would take longer time to process due to resource constraints

Some other changes to the project before the reorg:

  • New site name https://commonvoice.mozilla.org; All traffic from the old domain will be forwarded to the new domain automatically.
  • New GitHub repo name mozilla/common-voice and new branch name main. All traffic to the previous domain voice-web will be forwarded directly to the new repo, but you may need to manually update your git remote if you have a local copy of the site running.

Mozilla.org

An updated firefox/welcome/page4.ftl with new layout will be ready for localization in a few days. The turnaround time is rather short. Be on the lookout for it.

Along with this update is the temporary page called banners/firefox-daylight-launch.ftl that promotes Fenix. It has a life of a few weeks. Please localize it as soon as possible. Once done, you will see the localized banner on https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ on production.

The star priority ratings in Pontoon are also revised. The highest priority pages are firefox/all.ftl, firefox/new/*.ftl, firefox/whatsnew/*.ftl, and brands.ftl. The next level priority pages are the shared files. Unless a page has a hard deadline to complete, the rest are normal priority with a 3-star rating and you can take time to localize them.

WebThings Gateway

The team is completely dissolved due to the reorg. At the moment, the project would not take any new language requests or update the repo with changes in Pontoon. The project is actively working to move into a community-maintained state. We will update everyone as soon as that information becomes available.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

The Foundation website homepage got a major revamp, strings have been exposed to the relevant locales in the Engagement and Foundation website projects. There’s no strict deadline, you can complete this anytime. The content will be published live regularly, with a first push happening in a few days.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Download Terminology as TBX

We’ve added the ability to download Terminology from Pontoon in the standardized TBX file format, which allows you to exchange it with other users and systems. To access the feature, click on your user icon in the top-right section of the translation workspace and select “Download Terminology”.

Improving Machinery with SYSTRAN

We have an update on the work we’ve been doing with SYSTRAN to provide you with better machine translation options in Pontoon.

SYSTRAN has published three NMT models (German, French, and Spanish) based on contributions of Mozilla localizers. They are available in the SYSTRAN Marketplace as free and open source and accessible to any existing SYSTRAN NMT customers. In the future, we hope to make those models available beyond the SYSTRAN system.

These models have been integrated with Pontoon and are available in the Machinery tab. Please report any feedback that you have for them, as we want to make sure these are a useful resource for your contributions.

We’ll be working with SYSTRAN to learn how to build the models for new language pairs in 2021, which should widely expand the language coverage.

Search with Enter

From now on you need to press Enter to trigger search in the string list. This change unifies the behaviour of the string list search box and the Machinery search box, which despite similar looks previously hadn’t worked the same way. Former had been searching after the last keystroke (with a 500 ms delay), while latter after Enter was pressed.

Search on every keystroke is great when it’s fast, but string list search is not always fast. It becomes really tedious if more than 500 ms pass between the keystrokes and search gets triggered too early.

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: July 2020 Edition

Delphine

No responses yet

Welcome!

New localizers

Welcome Prasanta Hembram, Cloud-Prakash and Chakulu Hembram, from the newly created Santali community! They are currently localizing Firefox for iOS in Santali Ol Chiki script.

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

New community/locales added

Santali (Ol-Chiki script “sat-Olck”) has been added to Pontoon.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Deadlines

Upcoming deadlines:

  • Firefox 79 is currently in beta and will be released on July 28. The deadline to update localization was on July 14.
  • The deadline to update localizations for Firefox 80, currently in Nightly, will be August 11 (4 weeks after the previous deadline).

Using a more inclusive language

As explained in a recent email to dev-l10n, we’re in the process of removing English terms that make direct or indirect references to racial oppression and discrimination.

In terms of impact on localization, that mainly involves the Master Password feature, which is now called Primary Password, starting from Firefox 80.

A Primary Password is a password that unlocks the other passwords saved locally in Firefox. Primary passwords are not synced between profiles or devices.

We ask all localizers to keep these implications in mind when translating, and to evaluate the translations previously used for “Master Password” in this light. If you identify other terms in your localizations or in the en-US version of our products that you feel are racially-charged, please raise the issue in Bugzilla and CC any of the l10n-drivers.

Most string changes regarding this update already landed in the last few days, and are available for translation in Pontoon. There is also going to be an alert in Firefox 80, to warn the users about the change:

If your translations for “Master Password” and “Primary Password” are identical, you can leave that string empty, otherwise you should translate “Formerly known as Master Password” accordingly, so that the warning is displayed. The string should be exposed in Pontoon shortly after this l10n report is published.

New Onboarding

Make sure to test the new about:welcome in Nightly. As usual, it’s a good idea to test this type of changes in a new profile.

Note that a few more string updates and changes are expected to land this week, before Firefox 80 moves to beta.

New Experiments Section

Firefox 80 has a new Experiments section in Preferences (about:preferences#experimental). By the end of this Nightly cycle, there should be about 20 experiments listed there, generating a sizable content to translate, and often quite technical.

These are experiments that existed in Firefox for a while (since Firefox 70), but could only be manually enabled in about:config before this UI existed. Once the initial landing is complete, this feature will not require such a large amount of translation on a regular basis.

Most of these experiments will be available only in Nightly, and will be hidden in more stable versions, so it’s important – as always – to test your translations in Nightly. Given this, you should also prioritize translation for these strings accordingly, and focus on more visible parts first (always check the priority assigned to files in Pontoon).

What’s new or coming up in mobile

As many are already aware, the l10n deadline for getting strings into the Fenix release version was this past Saturday July 18th. Out of the 90 locales working on Fenix on Pontoon, 85 made it to release! Congratulations to everyone for their hard work and dedication in trying to keep the same mobile experience to all our global users! This was a very critical step in the adventure of our new Android mobile browser.

Since we are now past string freeze, we have exposed new strings for the upcoming release. More details on the l10n timeline will come soon, so stay tuned.

There will also be a new version of Firefox for iOS (v28) soon: the l10n deadline to complete strings – as well as testing – is today, Wednesday July 22nd (PDT, end of day).

We have screenshots in Taskcluster now so that you can test your work (vs Google Drive): feel free to send me feedback about those. A big thank you to the iOS team (especially Isabel Rios and Johan Lorenzo from RelEng) for getting these ready and updated regularly!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org

The web team continues making progress in migrating files to Fluent. Please take some time to review the files. Here are a few things to pay attention to:

String with a warning: It is important to check the strings with warnings first. They are usually caused by brands and product names not converted correctly because the names were translated. As long as these strings contain warnings, they can’t be activated at string level on production. Localized string with a warning will fallback to the English string. Since page activation threshold is at 80% completion, this means a page that was fully localized in the old format, if containing a warning, will appear to mix with English text.

String with error but no warning: All migrated pages need a thorough review. Even when a page doesn’t have warnings, it may contain errors that a script can’t detect. Here is an example:

  • .lang format:
    • en-US: Firefox browser – MSI installer
    • es-AR: Navegador Firefox – instalador MSI
  • .ftl format:
    • en: { -brand-name-firefox-browser } – MSI installer
    • es-AR after migration: Navegador { -brand-name-firefox } – instalador MSI
    • es-AR corrected: { -brand-name-firefox-browser } – instalador MSI

Testing on staging: Other than a few files that are “shared” or for forms, meaning the content in the file is not page specific, most files have a page specific URL for review. Here is an example to figure out how to test Firefox/enterprise.ftl:

  • Staging server: https://www-dev.allizom.org/{locale_code}
  • File path in Pontoon: https://pontoon.mozilla.org/{locale_code}/mozillaorg/en/firefox/enterprise.ftl/
  • Staging for the page: https://www-dev.allizom.org/{locale_code}/firefox/enterprise/
  • Example for es-AR: https://www-dev.allizom.org/es-AR/firefox/enterprise/

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Keeping track of Machinery translations.

Pontoon now stores Machinery source(s) of translations copied from the Machinery panel. The feature will help us evaluate performance of each Machinery source and make improvements in the future.

It should also help reviewers, who can instantly see if and which Machinery source was used while suggesting a translation. If it was, a “Copy” icon will appear over the author’s avatar and the Machinery sources will be revealed on hover.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

Accomplishments

We have a new locale available in Nightly for Firefox desktop: Silesian (szl). In less than 5 months, they managed to get over 60% completion, with most of the high priority parts close to 100%. Kudos to Rafał and Grzegorz for the great work.

Friends of the Lion

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

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

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

L10n Report: May 2020 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 localizer

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

Upcoming deadlines:

  • Firefox 77 is currently in beta and will be released on Jun 2. The deadline to update localization was on May 19.
  • The deadline to update localizations for Firefox 78, currently in Nightly, will be Jun 16 (4 weeks after the previous deadline).

IMPORTANT: Firefox 78 is the next ESR (Extended Support Release) version. That’s a more stable version designed for enterprises, but also used in some Linux distributions, and it remains supported for about a year. Once Firefox 78 moves to release, that content will remain frozen until that version becomes unsupported (about 15 months), so it’s important to ship the best localization possible.

In Firefox 78 there’s a lot of focus on the about:protections page. Make sure to test your changes on a new profile and in different states (e.g. logged out of Firefox Account and Monitor, logged into one of them, etc.). For example, the initial description changes depending on the fact that the user has enabled Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) or not:

  • Protections enabled: Firefox is actively protecting them, hence “Firefox protects your privacy behind the scenes while you browse”.
  • Protections disabled: Firefox could protect them, but it currently isn’t. So, ““Firefox can protect your privacy behind the scenes while you browse”.

Make sure to keep these nuances in your translation.

New Locales

With Firefox 78 we added 3 new locales to Nightly, since they made good progress and are ready for initial testing:

  • Central Kurdish (ckb)
  • Eastern Armenian with Classic Orthography (hye)
  • Mixteco Yucuhiti (meh)

All three are available for download on mozilla.org.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

  • Fennec Nightly and Beta channels have been successfully migrated to Fenix! Depending on the outcome of an experiment that launched this week, we may see the release channel migration happen soon. We’ll be sending some Fenix-specific comms this week.
  • The localization cycle for Firefox for iOS v26 has ended as of Monday, May 25th.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org

Mozilla.org is now at its new home: it was switched from .lang to Fluent format last Friday. Changing to the new format would allow us:

  • to put more natural expression power in localizers hands.
  • greater flexibility for translations & making string changes.
  • to make `en` as the source for localization, while en-US is a locale.
  • to push localized content to production more often and automatically throughout the day.

Only a handful high priority files have been migrated to the new format, as you have seen in the project dashboard. Please dedicate some time to go over the migrated files and report any technical issues you discover.  Please go over the updated How to test mozilla.org] documentation for what to focus on and how to report technical issues regarding the new file format.

The migration from the old format to the new would take some time to complete. Check the mozilla.org dashboard in Pontoon regularly for updates. In the coming weeks, there will be new pages added, including the next WNP.

Web of Things

No new feature development for the foreseeable future. However, adding new locales, bug fixes and localized content are being made to the GitHub repository on a regular basis.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

Next week is Firefox 77 release. It presents few updates to our KB articles:

In the next weeks we will communicate with the members a lot of news we had been working in the past months, between those:

  • Reports on views and helpfulness of the translated articles
  • Content for new contribution channels

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Django 2. As of April, Pontoon runs on Django 2. The effort to make the transition happen was started a while ago by Jotes, who first made the Pontoon codebase run on Python 3, which is required for Django 2. And the effort was also completed by Jotes, who took care of squashing DB migrations and other required steps for Pontoon to say goodbye to Django 1. Well done, Jotes!

New user avatars. Pontoon uses the popular Gravatar service for displaying user avatars. Until recently, we’ve been showing a headshot of a red panda as the fallback avatar for users without a Gravatar. But that made it hard to distinguish users just by scanning their avatars sometimes, so we’re now building custom avatars from their initials. Thanks and welcome to our new contributor, Vishnudas!

Private projects. Don’t worry, we’re not limiting access to any projects on pontoon.mozilla.org, but there are 3rd party deployments of Pontoon, which would benefit from such a feature. Jotes started paving the way for that by adding the ability to switch projects between private and public and making all new projects private after they’ve been set up. That means they are only accessible to project managers, which allows the project setup to be tested without using a separate deployment for that purpose (e.g. a stage server) and without confusing users with broken projects. If any external team wants to take the feature forward as specified, we’d be happy to take patches upstream, but we don’t plan to develop the feature ourselves, since we don’t need it at Mozilla.

More reliable Sync. Thanks to Vishal, Pontoon sync is now more immune to errors we’ve been hitting every now and then and spending a bunch of time debugging. Each project sync task is now encapsulated in a single celery task, which makes it easier to rollback and recover from errors.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

  • Gürkan Güllü, who is the second person to exceed 2000 suggestions on Pontoon in the Turkish community, and is making significant contributions to SUMO as well.

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

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

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

How to unleash the full power of Fluent as a localizer

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

1 response

Fluent is an extremely powerful system, providing localizers with a level of flexibility that has no equivalent in other localization systems. It can be as straightforward as older formats, thanks to Pontoon’s streamlined interface, but it requires some understanding of the syntax to fully utilize its potential.

Here are a few examples of how you can get the most out of Fluent. But, before jumping in, you should get familiar with our documentation about Fluent syntax for localizers, and make sure to know how to switch to the Advanced FTL mode, to work directly with the syntax of each message.

Plurals

Plural forms are a really complex subject; some locales don’t use any (e.g. Chinese), English and most Romance languages use two (one vs many), others use all the six forms defined by CLDR (e.g. Arabic). Fluent gives you all the flexibility that you need, without forcing you to provide all forms if you don’t need them (unlike Gettext, for example).

Consider this example displayed in Pontoon for Arabic:

Screenshot of a plural string in Pontoon for ArabicThe underlying reference message is:

# Variables:
# $numBreachesResolved (Number) - Number of breaches marked as resolved by the user on Monitor.
# $numBreaches (Number) - Number of breaches in which a user's data was involved, detected by Monitor.
monitor-partial-breaches-title =
    { $numBreaches ->
       *[other] { $numBreachesResolved } out of { $numBreaches } breaches marked as resolved
    }

You can see it if you switch to the FTL advanced mode, and temporarily COPY the English source.

This gives you a lot of information:

  • It’s a message with plurals, although only the other category is defined for English.
  • The other category is also the default, since it’s marked with an asterisk.
  • The value of $numBreaches defines which plural form will be used.

First of all, since you only have one form, you can decide to remove the select logic completely. This is equivalent to:

monitor-partial-breaches-title = { $numBreachesResolved } out of { $numBreaches } breaches marked as resolved

You might ask: why is there a plural in English then? That’s a great question! It’s just a small hack to trick Pontoon into displaying the UI for plurals.

But there’s more: what if this doesn’t work for your language? Consider Italian, for example: to get a more natural sounding sentence, I would translate it as “10 breaches out of 20 marked as resolved”. There are two issues to solve: I need $numBreachesResolved (number of solved breaches) to determine which plural form to use, not the total number, and I need a singular form. While I can’t make these changes directly through Pontoon’s UI, I can still write my own syntax:

monitor-partial-breaches-title =
    { $numBreachesResolved ->
        [one] { $numBreachesResolved } violazione su { $numBreaches } contrassegnata come risolta
       *[other] { $numBreachesResolved } violazioni su { $numBreaches } contrassegnate come risolte
    }

Notice the two relevant changes:

  • There is now a one form (used for 1 in Italian).
  • $numBreachesResolved is used to determine which plural form is selected ($numBreachesResolved ->).

Terms

We recently started migrating mozilla.org to Fluent, and there are a lot of terms defined for specific feature names and brands. Using terms instead of hard-coding text in strings helps ensure consistency and enforce branding rules. The best example is probably the term for Firefox Account, where the “account” part is localizable.

-brand-name-firefox-account = Firefox Account

In Italian it’s translated as “account Firefox”. But it should be “Account Firefox” if used at the beginning of a sentence. How can I solve this, without removing the term and getting warnings in Pontoon? I can define a parameterized term.

-brand-name-firefox-account =
    { $capitalization ->
       *[lowercase] account Firefox
        [uppercase] Account Firefox
    }

In this example, the default is lowercase, since it’s the most common form in Italian. By using only the term reference { -brand-name-firefox-account }, it will be automatically displayed as “account Firefox”.

login-button = Accedi al tuo { -brand-name-firefox-account }

What if I need the uppercase version?

login-title = { -brand-name-firefox-account(capitalization: "uppercase") }

You can find more information about terms, as well as other examples, in our documentation. And don’t forget to check the rules about brand names.

Things you shouldn’t translate

Variables and placeables should not be translated. The good news is that they’re easy to spot, since they’re surrounded by curly parentheses:

  • Variable reference: { $somevariable }
  • Term reference: { -someterm }
  • Message reference: { somemessage }

The content between parentheses must be kept as in the English source string.

The same is valid for the data-l10n-name attribute in HTML elements. Consider for example:

update-downloading = <img data-l10n-name="icon"/>Downloading update —

The only thing to translate in this message is “Downloading update -”. “Icon” and “download-status” should be kept untranslated.

The rule of thumb is to pay extra attention when there are curly parentheses, since they’re used to identify special elements of the syntax.

Another example:

menu-menuitem-preferences =
   { PLATFORM() ->
       [windows] Options
      *[other] Preferences
   }

PLATFORM() is a function, and should not be translated. windows and other are variant names, and should be kept unchanged as well.

One other thing to look out for are style attributes, since they’re used for CSS rules.

downloads-panel-list =
    .style = width: 70ch

width: 70ch is a CSS rule to define the width of an element, and should be kept untranslated. The only thing that you might want to change is the actual value, for example to make it larger (width: 75ch). Note that ch is a unit of measure used in CSS.

Bringing terminology support to Pontoon

Matjaž Horvat

No responses yet

Terminology is a group of specialized words, compound words or multi-word expressions (terms) relating to a particular field. We’ve recently shipped the ability to store such terms in Pontoon, and now they’ve become conveniently integrated into the translation workbench.

Terminology in Pontoon

Motivation

By integrating terminology, we wanted to bring improvements to the translation process in several areas:

  • Localization consistency. It’s hard to expect all authors to always use the same translations for the same words and phrases without any help from the tool.
  • Translation pace. Until now, localizers had to manually search for existing translations of terms found in the strings they are translating.
  • Content comprehension. The meaning of specific expressions is not always clear, especially if the comment isn’t provided.
  • Brand translation. Trademarks present a special case for localization as they have legal and semantic significance, and often come with localization constraints.

How does it work?

Terms are highlighted in the original string, similarly to how we highlight placeables. On click a popup appears with a list of matching terms and corresponding metadata (part of speech, definition, usage example and translation). By clicking any of the terms in the list, term translation gets inserted into the editor.

We’ve also added the Terms panel in the 3rd column, which behaves similarly as the popup, but contains all the terms found in the string. Since this is now the 4th panel in the right column, we’ve split it in half, so that two panels can be visible at the same time (Terms and Machinery by default).

Next steps

The list of terms and their metadata is jointly maintained by several teams across Mozilla. Term translations are currently only available for a small set of locales, but we’re already working on the ability to establish a process for all locales to provide translations. Stay tuned!

In the mid term we also plan to:

  • Make terms available in a public repository in a standardized format for each locale.
  • Add the ability for localizers to propose new terms.
  • Include terms in our quality checks.

L10n Report: April 2020 Edition

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

1 response

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. 

Before we get into the report, we must share that Youghourta Benali, one of the Arabic l10n community’s managers, has passed away due to prior health issues. He was a passionate activist for the open Web and Arabic’s presence on the Web, localizing Mozilla projects for over 7 years. We’ll all miss him and wish his family and friends peace at this time. The surviving Arabic managers are currently writing a guest post that we’ll post here when ready.

Welcome!

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

New community/locales added

Other updates

Enforcing 2 factors authentication in GitHub for mozilla-l10n

As recently communicated in our mailing lists, on April 27 we will enforce the 2 factor authentication (2FA) in GitHub for the mozilla-l10n organization.

If you are part of the mozilla-l10n organization, but don’t have 2FA enabled, you will be automatically removed. This won’t prevent you from opening pull requests or filing issues, for example, and you will be able to rejoin (if you want) after enabling 2FA.

As explained in the original announcement, a lot has changed since we started using GitHub for Mozilla Localization, almost 5 years ago. We have consolidated contribution paths to l10n to Pontoon, and having direct access to repositories is not necessary anymore. Write access is already not allowed for some repositories, since formats are not user-friendly and can be properly managed only through localization tools.

For more information about enabling 2FA in GitHub, refer to this document.

Call to clean up Pontoon projects

We have seen that Pontoon contains a handful of projects per community that receive a lot of unreviewed translations. Many of these are low priority projects that the active and core community members have not contributed to in around a year. We’re asking locale managers to review their list of enabled projects in Pontoon and select projects you’re all willing to deactivate. We will be communicating with managers shortly to determine which projects we should deactivate for your locale.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Upcoming deadlines:

  • Firefox 76 is currently in beta and will be released on May 5. The deadline to update localization has just passed (April 21).
  • The deadline to update localizations for Firefox 77, currently in Nightly, will be May 19 (4 weeks after the previous deadline).

As explained in previous editions of the l10n report, In terms of localization priority and deadlines, note that the content of the What’s new panel, available at the bottom of the hamburger menu, doesn’t follow the release train. For example, content for 76 has been exposed on April 15, but it will be possible to update translations until the very end of the cycle, beyond the normal deadline for that version. You can find these strings in the asrouter.ftl file in Pontoon.

To test on Nightly:

  • Type about:config in the address bar and press enter. Click the button to accept the risk and continue.
  • Search for browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.asrouter.devtoolsEnabled and make sure that it’s set to true (double click it if it’s false). This will enable a new wrench icon in the New Tab page.
  • Search for browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.asrouter.useRemoteL10n and set it to false. This will force the browser to use translations available in the build, instead of translations hosted remotely (those are updated less frequently). It’s important to use Nightly and not Beta for this.
  • Open a New Tab, click on the wrench icon in the top right corner. This should open the about:newtab#devtools page. On the left sidebar, click on What’s New Panel, then click the button Open What’s New Panel.

There is also a new warning for vulnerable passwords in about:logins. You can find information on how to trigger this warning in this page.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Firefox iOS

  • The l10n cycle for Firefox for iOS v25 ends 27 April.
  • New screenshots have been added to the project landing page in Pontoon.

Fenix

The Fenix launch continues to be a high priority for Mozilla. The date of that launch will depend on the outcome of a handful of experiments. In the meantime, string updates should be minimal, and we continue to aim for shipping all locales that are present on Fennec.

Milestones

  • Feature complete date: to be announced when set
  • Source string freeze date: to be announced when set
  • Localized string freeze date: estimated to be July
  • Fenix launch date: no sooner than July

Current progress

  • Current average Fenix completion percentage across all locales: 74% (1% increase)
  • Target average completion percentage across all locales: 90%

Just a reminder, you can find the Fenix Nightly builds in the Google Play Store for testing your localization. Please take the time to test! Your language will appear in the app settings once you begin localizing the project in Pontoon and the Fenix team imports your locale into the build process. If you don’t localize the project, your language will not appear in the builds. Please note that at least Android 5 is necessary to use and test Fenix on an Android device.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org

There have been a few updates since the last report. The following two are new:

  • firefox/whatsnew_76.lang: the page is due on 26 April for these locales: de, en-CA, en-GB, and fr. Other locales are nice to have, with a fallback to WNP.
  • firefox/enterprise/index.lang.

Legal Documentation

The following languages for the Common Voice project have reached the milestones that require legal documents for Privacy Notice and Terms of Use. They are still in the work as we speak. If you are interested in reviewing them, the documents will be ready by early next week. Please note, any review feedback requires a peer review before being pushed to production.

Newly added languages: Abkhaz, Arabic, Assamese, Greek, Czech, Frisian, Indonesian, Japanese, Latvian, Maltese, Punjabi (India), Polish, Portuguese (pt-BR), Romansh (for Romansh Sursilvan & Romansh Vallader), Romanian, Slovenian, and Ukrainian

Events

We planned to organize multilocale workshops again for this year. With country closures, COVID-19 outbreaks, and the long road to economic recovery for industries we rely on for the logistics of these events, we have decided to cancel these workshops for 2020. We’re working to figure out a suitable replacement for these in-person events in 2020, stay tuned. We will revisit in October to determine what we can do for 2021.

As you’ve seen from the Mozilla Reps, they’ve made some changes to the event funding process to respect local effects of COVID-19. Effectively, if your local government has issued a quarantine or shelter-in-place order, please respect those orders and cancel your Fenix l10n hackathon. If that does not apply to you, you can still organize a local hackathon. I have created an event in the new community portal for Fenix localization. If you would like to organize a local l10n hackathon in the coming weeks to bring your locale to 100% complete, please reach out to a Resource Rep. Budget requests from Resource Reps for under USD$100 will be fast-tracked for approval.

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: March Edition

Théo Chevalier

No responses yet

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

Welcome!

New localizers

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

L10n Community in Matrix

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

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

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

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

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

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

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

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

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

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org

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

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

Firefox Accounts:

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

Web of Things

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

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

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

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

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

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

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

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Introducing comments

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

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

Pre-translation and post-editing

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

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

Word count

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

Events

Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Reach out to any l10n-driver and we’ll include that (see links to emails at the bottom of this report)

Friends of the Lion

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

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

 

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

Introducing comments in Pontoon

Matjaž Horvat

No responses yet

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Original string comments

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

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

Discoverability of comments

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

What’s next?

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

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