Firefox 85 is currently in beta and will be released on January 26. The deadline to update localization is on January 17 (see this older l10n report to understand why it moved closer to the release date).
As anticipated in the last report, this release cycle is longer than usual (6 weeks instead of 4), to accommodate for the end of year holidays in Europe and the US.
The number of new strings remains pretty low, but expect this to change during the first half of 2021, when we should have new content, thanks to a mix of new features and old interfaces revisited. There will also be changes to improve consistency around the use of Title Case and Sentence case for English. This won’t result in new strings to translate for other locales, but it’s a good reminder that each locale should set and follow its own rules, and they should be documented in style guides.
Since we’re at the end of year, here are a few numbers for Firefox:
We currently ship Firefox in 96 languages. You should be proud of that accomplishment, since it makes Firefox the most widely localized browser on the market [1].
Nightly ships with 10 additional locales. Some of them are very close to shipping in stable builds, hopefully that will happen in 2021.
[1] Disclaimer: other browsers make it quite difficult to understand which languages are effectively supported (there’s no way to switch language, and they don’t necessarily work in the open). Other vendors seem to also have a low entry barrier when it comes to adding a new language, and listing it as available. On the other hand, at Mozilla we require high priority parts to be completely translated, or very close, and a sustainable community before shipping.
When we first shipped the ability to add comments within Pontoon we mentioned that there were some additional features that would be coming, and I’m happy to announce that those features are now active.
What are those features, you say? Let’s have a look:
Mentions
If you have a comment that you need to ensure is seen by a particular person on the project, you can now ‘mention’ that person by typing the “@” symbol and their name. Once the comment is submitted that person will then be notified that they have been mentioned in a comment.
Pinned Comments
Project Managers can now Pin comments within the Comments panel in the 3rd column. This will not only add a visible pin to the comment, it will also place the comment within the source string Metadata section in the middle column and make it visible globally across all locales.
Request Context or Report Issue
Also present in the top section of the middle column is a new button that allows localizers to request more context or report an issue in the source string. When utilized this button will open the Comments panel and insert a mention for the contact person of the project. This will ensure that the contact person receives a notification about the comment.
Request Context or Report Issue button allows localizers to ping Project Managers, which can pin their responses to become globally visible for everyone.
Final Thoughts
As you can probably tell by the descriptions, all of these features work hand-in-hand with each other to help improve the workflow and communication within Pontoon.
For example, if you run into an ambiguous string, you can request context and the contact person will clarify it for you. If the meaning of the source string is not clear for the general audience, they can also pin their response, which will make it visible to everyone and even notify users who already translated or reviewed the string.
It has truly been a pleasure to work on this feature, first as part of my Outreachy internship and then as a contributor, and I hope that it has a positive impact on your work within Pontoon. I look forward to making continued contributions.
Firefox 83 is currently in beta and will be released on November 17. The deadline to update localization is on November 8 (see the previous l10n report to understand why it moved closer to the release date).
There might be changes to the release schedule in December. If that happens, we’ll make sure to cover them in the upcoming report.
The number of new strings remains pretty low, but there was a change that landed without new string IDs: English switched from a hyphen (-) to an em dash (–) as separator for window titles. Since this is a choice that belongs to each locale, and the current translation might be already correct, we decided to not invalidate all existing translations and notify localizers instead.
You can see the details of the strings that changed in this changeset. The full list of IDs, in case you want to search for them in Pontoon:
browser-main-window
browser-main-window-mac
page-info-page
page-info-frame
webrtc-indicator-title
tabs.containers.tooltip
webrtcIndicator.windowtitle
timeline.cssanimation.nameLabel
timeline.csstransition.nameLabel
timeline.scriptanimation.nameLabel
toolbox.titleTemplate1
toolbox.titleTemplate2
TitleWithStatus
profileTooltip
Alternatively, you can search for “ – “ in Pontoon, but you’ll have to skim through a lot of results, since Pontoon searches also in comments.
What’s new or coming up in mobile
Firefox for iOS v29, as well as iOS v14, both recently shipped – bringing with them the possibility to make Firefox your default browser for the first time ever!
v29 also introduced a Firefox homescreen widget, and more widgets will likely come soon. Congratulations to all for helping localize these awesome new features!
v30 strings have just recently been exposed on Pontoon, and the deadline for l10n strings completion is November 4th. Screenshots will be updated for testing very soon.
Firefox for Android (“Fenix”) is currently open for localizing v83 strings. The next couple of weeks should be used for completing your current pending strings, as well as testing your work for the release. Take a look at our updated docs here!
What’s new or coming up in web projects
Mozilla.org
Recently, the monthly WNP pages that went out with the Firefox releases contained content promoting features that were not available for global markets or campaign messages that targeted select few markets. In these situations, for all the other locales, the page was always redirected to the evergreen WNP page. As a result, please make it a high priority if your locale has not completed the page.
More pages were added and migrated to Fluent format. For migrated content, the web team has decided not to make any edits until there is a major content update or page layout redesign. Please take the time to resolve errors first as the page may have been activated. If a placeable error is not fixed, it will be shown on production.
Common Voice & WebThings Gateway
Both projects now have a new point of contact. If you want to add a new language or have any questions with the strings, send an email directly to the person first. Follow the projects’ latest development through the channels on Discourse. The l10n-drivers will continue to provide support to both teams through the Pontoon platform.
What’s new or coming up in SuMo
Please help us localize the following articles for Firefox 82 (desktop and Android):
Spring cleaning on the road to Django 3. Our new contributor Philipp started the process of upgrading Django to the latest release. In a period of 12 days, he landed 12(!) patches, ranging from library updates and replacing out-of-date libraries with native Python and Django capabilities to making our testing infrastructure more consistent and dropping unused code. Well done, Philipp! Thanks to Axel and Jotes for the reviews.
Newly published localizer facing documentation
Firefox for Android docs have been updated to reflect the recent changes introduced by our migration to the new “Fenix” browser. We invite you to take a look as there are many changes to the Firefox for Android localization workflow.
Events
Kudos to these long time Mozillians who found creative ways to spread the words promoting their languages and sharing their experience by taking the public airways.
Wim of Frisian was interviewed by a local radio station where he shared his passion localizing Mozilla projects. He took the opportunity to promote Common Voice and call for volunteers speaking Frisian. Since the airing of the story, Frisian saw an increase with 11 hours spoken clips and an increase between 250 to 400 people donating their voices. The interview would be aired monthly.
Quentin of Occitan made an appearance in this local news story in the south of French, talking about using Pontoon to localize Mozilla products in Occitan.
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
Iskandar of Indonesian community for his huge efforts completing Firefox for Android (Fenix) localization in recent months.
Dian Ina and Andika of Indonesian community for their huge efforts completing the Thunderbird localization in recent months!
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)!
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.
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:
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:
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!
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.
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.
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)
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:
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:
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.
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)!
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.
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:
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 everynowandthen 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.
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)!
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:
The 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.
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 }
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.
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.
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.
