Localization Hackathon in Kuala Lumpur

The last weekend of August saw the largest localization hackathon event the l10n-drivers ever organized. Thirty-four community contributors representing 12 languages from 13 East and Southeast Asian countries journeyed to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on Friday, August 26. Jeff, Flod, Gary Kwong and I arrived in time for the welcome dinner with most of the community members. The restaurant, LOKL Coffee, was ready for a menu makeover and took the opportunity to use this Mozilla event to do just that. A professional photographer spent much of the evening with us snapping photos.

We started off Saturday morning with Spectrogram, where l10n contributors moved from one side of the room to another to illustrate whether they agreed or disagreed with a statement. Statements help us understand each community’s preferences to address localization requests. An example: There are too many translation/localization tasks for me to keep up; I want to work on 2000 strings sliced up in 1 year, twice, 6 weeks, 4 weeks, weekly, every other day, daily.

Jeff, the newly appointed localization manager, updated everyone on l10n organization change; the coming attraction of the l20n development; Pontoon as one of the centralized l10n tools; and the ultimate goal of having a single source of l10n dashboard for the communities and l10n project managers.

Flod briefed on the end of Firefox OS and the new initiatives with Connected Device. He focused on Firefox primarily. He discussed the 6-week rapid release cycles or cadence. He also covered the five versions of Firefox: Aurora, nightly, beta, release, and ERS. He described the change to a single source of repository, allowing strings move to production sooner. Firefox for iOS and Android were also presented. It was welcome news that the localized product can be shipped through automatic signoff, without community’s involvement.

I talked about the importance of developing a style guide for each of the languages represented. This helps with onboarding new comers, consistency among all contributors and sets the style and tone for each of the Mozilla products. I also briefly touched upon the difference between brand names and product names. I suggested to take this gathering as an opportunity to work on these.

For the rest of the weekend, our communities worked through the goals they set for ourselves. Many requested to move their locales to Pontoon, causing a temporarily stall in sync. Others completed quite a few projects, making significant advances on the dashboard charts. Even more decided to tackle the style guides, referencing the template and leveraging information from established outlets. When the weekend was over, nine communities reported to have some kind of draft versions, or modified and updated an existing one. Other accomplishments included identifying roles and responsibilities; making plans for meetup for the rest of the year; tool training; improving translation quality by finding critical errors; updating glossaries; completing some high priority projects.

The weekend was not just all work, but filled with cultural activities. Our Saturday dinner at Songket Restaurant was followed by almost an hour of Malaysian cultural dances from across the country, showcasing the diverse cultures that made up Malaysia. Many community members were invited to the stage to participate. It was a fun evening filled with laughter. Our Sunday dinner was arranged inside Pasar Seni, or the Central Market, a market dating back to 1888. It is now filled with shops and restaurants, giving all visitors a chance to take home some souvenirs and fond memories. Many of us visited the near by Pedaling Street, sampling tropical fruits, including Durian, made in all shapes and forms.

Putting together the largest l10n hackathon ever is a big achievement and lots of credit goes to our local support. A big thanks to our Malaysian community, led by Syafiq, who was our eyes and ears on the ground from day one, planning, selecting the venue location, advising us on restaurants, lodging, transportation and cultural events. Not only we accomplished what we set out to do, we did it safely, we all had fun and we made more friends. Also a shout-out to Nasrun, our residence photographer for documenting the weekend through his lens. And a thank you to everyone for sharing a very special and productive weekend with fellow Mozillians! See you next time at another hackathon!