French L10N Team #4 Locasprint

(French version)

When French Mozillians join in Paris Office to translate all over a week-end, they call it locasprint: French contributors are working and have fun together in the same place to improve French user experience of every Mozilla product. Here is a quick report of our recent #4 Locasprint.

Goals, metrics and piment d’Espelette

Various and ever–changing tasks, volunteer contributors always working with a strong conviction that funny things should be done seriously while serious stuff deserves fun, that is an acceptable wrap-up of what happened in Mozilla Paris Office, on February 12-14th.

Every goal we set has been reached, from mozilla.org, Sumo and MDN pages translation to Firefox+Vous Feb newsletter localization, from welcoming newcomers to Transvision bug fixes, not to mention the usual number of beloved snippets for the coming 6 weeks.

SuMo French-speaking visitors, you are welcome

SUMO (SUpport MOzilla) is a critical resource for users looking for information, solutions, tips and guidance.

We are proud to report the 100% translated target was reached once again (40 articles were waiting to be translated or updated before the event).

This achievement was unlocked owing to the steady and awesome work of our “trained” contributors, including those who unfortunately could not join us in Paris but who contributed online (thank you Imen and Jean-Marie)… but we were very glad to welcome two new brilliant contributors, namely Mathilde and Elsa, who translated or reviewed more than 20 documents. And a special thanks to Genma, a Free and open source hacktivist, who spent one afternoon translating with us.

Of course we are aware this 100% is rather symbolic and temporary, since the very next day a series of updates slowed down the counters to 99%. Our task is never ending, but let’s consider it is a sign of good health when support documentation is active and constantly responsive!

— By the way, did I mention the 15 top viewed articles (among others) are now illustrated with French-speaking interface screenshots?

Mozilla Development Network: the incredible French team strikes again

Five people actively contributed during the sprint to the massive and ever-growing MDN documentation platform:

Gael is a newcomer who discovered the edit/translate process and made his first edits on Friday
Maxime, Marie and Philippe respectively continued their “Mercredi Doc” (a weekly workshop on documentation) work on:
Julien worked on JavaScript, Learning Area, CSS and HTML pages…

… while Jeremie, who is organizing the Mercredi Docs evenings, helped answer questions about the trickiest areas of MDN. Joining all these efforts, we can say that French is among the top languages available on MDN.

Julien, Marie and Maxime also discovered and tested Florian Scholz’s extension which is a pretty promising quality check tool for MDN pages. Fork it on Github!

MDNcheck — *Now with French interface for this handy Quality Check tool*

More localization…

During the week-end, our long-time Mozillian Pierre (aka Mozinet) translated (and published on our community blog) the Questions&Answers session of Ari Jaaski about recent Mozilla end of support announcement for Firefox OS on smartphones, community involvement and new fields of development.
Firefox + You newsletter French edition for February has been reviewed and validated, soon to be in the inbox of more than 200,000 subscribers.
Pontoon, the translation platform which is now the most used online localization tool for Mozillians around the world, has received French updates so that it is currently 100% translated! It was great to welcome another newcomer: André is a professional translator, who gave a helping hand to snippets translation.
Some pages on mozilla.org were also targeted, such as the unstable Thunderbird versions download page, the Mozilla leadership page, or the new Firefox Hello page.
We also translated the next Firefox Hello release, soon to be available in your browser.

pontoon_engagement — *We do like green in Pontoon…*

Transvision Hackathon

Locasprint is all about translation, but not exclusively! A little team of developers gathered and hacked our great Transvision and fixed bugs. Transvision is a very handy tool for all Mozillian translators of the world, since it maintains all Mozillian translated strings in every language. We were glad to have Philippe Dessante, the creator of the original Transvision and old-timer Mozillian.

For some developers it was the opportunity to make a fresh start, sharing good practices and knowledge on development all along the event. Anthony, Benoit, Porkepix, Thegennok and Vincent opened 14 Pull Requests!

Special thanks to Francesco Lodolo for online support and code reviews.

Time for community

Having goals is energizing, reaching them is satisfying, but Locasprints are so much more than that.

A major part of the French community is working remotely, so it is an opportunity to meet in real life, get to know each other, talk about Mozilla and everything else, meet again old volunteer contributors and welcome new ones, eat and drink and laugh at the Office and at a restaurant.

So Mozilla localization team deserves a big thanks for funding this 4th session, generously offering food and transportation to 20+ participants.

The social moment on Saturday night at the restaurant, enjoying tasty South West France specialties (great duck breast, roast potatoes cooked with goose fat as side dish and axoa with piment d’Espelette…) is really part of the French way to be an active, vibrant and friendly community.