Firefox L10n Report – Nightly 55

This is going to be the last of these reports, since Aurora is going away, and Nightly strings will be exposed to localization tools once or twice a week. We’ll work on identifying new formats to keep you up to speed with all the changes happening in localization at Mozilla.

For further information about the change for Aurora, we’ve created these FAQs: https://github.com/mozilla-l10n/localizer-documentation/blob/master/misc/aurora_faqs.md

Nightly projects are already available in Pontoon, they will be available shortly also in Pootle.

Today Firefox 55 starts a second cycle on the Nightly channel, and these are the key dates:

• Beta (54): localization updates for already shipping locales must be completed before May 31.
• On June 12, Nightly (55) will move directly to the Beta channel.

String breakdown for locales starting to work on Nightly for the first time:

• Firefox Nightly desktop has 695 added strings (97 obsolete). The actual number of missing strings will be much lower (184), since over 500 of them are a copy of the /preferences folder (see details later). About 4% of the new strings are for Developer Tools.
• Fennec Nightly has 23 new strings (27 obsolete). 8 new strings are Fennec-only (in /mobile).

Noteworthy Changes

These are some of the interesting changes introduced in the last cycle.

Browser

Preferences are going to be heavily reorganized. 13 existing files (513 strings) have been copied from /preferences to /preferences-old as part of merge day migration scripts.

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/892ffc32ee08

Note that “new preferences” and “old preferences” have already started to diverge. In some cases there are small changes, like final colon or ellipses removed; your tool’s translation memory should help for these (make sure to double check the suggested translation).

In some other cases, you will have to translate new strings twice, since the new preferences are currently only enabled in Nightly (hidden behind a preference), and might not move to Beta with Firefox 55.

Mobile

Searchplugins are now managed similarly to desktop. The entire mobile/searchplugins folder is not used anymore and has been removed as part of merge day.

Common issues

wc-reporter.label

This is a string destined to be displayed in the hamburger menu (on Nightly): \u00ad is a special character used to tell the system to disable hyphenation.

You should *not* keep that character in your translation, unless that’s what you plan to do (disable automatic hyphenation, and only after testing on as many platforms as possible). Make sure to test this string, and shorten it if necessary, because there’s space only for 3 lines of text in these buttons.

New Languages

A few new languages are moving to Beta (and later release) with Firefox 54:

• Burmese (my) for desktop.
• Bulgarian (bg) and Kabyle (kab) for Android.

Congratulations to all the teams involved for reaching this goal.

If you want to know more about the process of releasing new locales, or if you speak one of these languages and want to know how to help the localization teams, please get in touch.

To all localizers: Thanks again for all the time and effort you put in localizing and promoting Firefox in your language.