Pontoon Roadmap for 2017q1

At the end of last year we asked Pontoon users to participate in our survey in order to help us make better decisions on their behalf and shape the future of Mozilla’s translation tool.

Turnout exceeded our expectations: in the first 24 hours alone, 120 members of Mozilla localization community casted their votes. That gave us confidence to base Pontoon 2017 Roadmap on results of the survey. Let’s have a look at them!

154 people participated in the survey. They had to vote on each of this features from 1 to 5, so the minimum number of votes per idea was also 154.

Let’s see how survey results turn into Pontoon roadmap for the first quarter of the year:

In-app notifications. We’ll add the ability to send targeted notifications to relevant users on special events. For example, users who submitted translations to Firefox for iOS will receive a notification when new strings arrive. Author will be notified when new suggestion gets submitted for the string she translated. A few days before the deadline, we’ll send a reminder to team managers and translators of incomplete locales.

Priorities and deadlines. This is a requirement for some of the notifications described above, so it’s likely to get released earlier. For each project, we’ll show how important it is and when is the deadline to submit translations (if available). For projects like Mozilla.org (and in the future Firefox), we’ll also display priority and deadline information on a file level.

Screenshot-based localization. As goofy commented in the survey, 3 things are high priority: add context, provide context, show context 😉. What in-context localization brings to websites, screenshots could bring to product l10n. We’d like to explore that by designing a user interface for navigating strings by screenshots and displaying screenshot for any string. And we’ll try to do that as part of Google Summer of Code. Stay tuned!

Terminology and Glossary. The one and only Jotes already started integrating Microsoft Terminology into translation interface and we’re planning to ship that by the end of the quarter. As the first step towards creating Mozilla Terminology, we’ll also set up a localization project with terms extracted from various Mozilla projects. After Q1 we’ll focus on building a specialized functionality for creating, maintaining and translating terms.

L20n. While this hasn’t been called out as part of the survey, we have some work left to do regarding the implementation of the UI for advanced L20n features. A solid step forward has been made last year and now we have to land it and finalize the missing pieces.

The rest of the ideas from the survey will either get our attention post Q1 or will only get partially resolved during the first quarter. An example of the latter is merging Pontoon with our standalone dashboards (Elmo and Web Dashboard), which we’ll be effectivelly starting to do by adding support for priorities, deadlines and notifications, and also by outlining a plan to bring together the rest of the functionality.

And remember: even if the survey is now closed, you can always vote or comment on existing ideas or add new ones.