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Categories: L10n Reports Planet

L10N Report: June Edition

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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.

Welcome!

New localizers

  • Lots of new contributors joined us through the Common Voice project: Jimi (Danish) Fran (Icelandic), Kaz, (Japanese), Joshua (Kyrgyz), Niko (Komi-Zyrian), Sardana (Sakha), Bjartur (Faroese), Donald (Hong Kong), Gregor (Slovenian), Jack (Erzya), Kelly (Hakha Chin), and a few in the Korean team. Welcome to you all! You are the reasons that the Common Voice project is expanding in record pace in both the number of locales and the diversity of the contributors
  • We have new contributors helping to revive Afrikaans l10n. Welcome Jean, Stephan and Vincent!

Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!

New community/locales added

  • Erzya
  • Faroese
  • Hakha Chin
  • Komi-Zyrian
  • Kyrgyz
  • Sakha
  • Quechua Chanka
  • Aymara
  • K’iche’

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Firefox 61 has been released on June 26th. This also means that Firefox 62 is in Beta, while 63 is on Nightly, and that’s where you should focus your work for localization and testing.

This development cycle will be a little longer than usual, to account for Summer holidays in the Northern hemisphere: the deadline to provide your localization for Beta is August 21st, with Firefox 62 planned for release on September 5th.That’s a Wednesday and not a Tuesday, which is the common release day for Mozilla products, because September 3rd is a public holiday in US (Labor Day).

Now, diving into updates and new content. There are several new in-product pages:

  • We talked about Shield Studies in the l10n report for May. about:studies is now available for localization.
  • Issues can occur when multiple instances of Firefox are open, and a pending update is applied to one of them. A new page, about:restartrequired, was created to inform the user that a restart is needed to avoid such problems.
  • Activity Stream is expanding beyond the New page. One of the directions is to experiment with a new, in-product first run experience, about:welcome, replacing the existing one based on web content served from mozilla.org.

One important note about Activity Stream (about:newtab and about:welcome): unlike other strings in Firefox, once translated they are not used directly in the following Nightly, they need a new build of Activity Stream (for now). That normally happens once a week. For this reason, if you’re targeting Beta, make sure to prioritize localization of activity-stream/newtab.properties.

What’s new or coming up in Test Pilot

Two new Test Pilot experiments were published on the website about 3 weeks ago: Color and Side View. While the experiments themselves were not localized, new content was added to the website. Unfortunately, that happened with poor timing, resulting in English content being displayed on the website. The following cycle is longer than usual (normally they are 2 weeks long), because most people were traveling for the bi-annual Mozilla All Hands, making things worse.

We realize that this is less than ideal, and we are trying to set up a system to avoid repeating these mistakes in the future.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

As mentioned in the section about Firefox desktop, Firefox 61 has been released on June 26th, which means that Firefox for Android 61 updates will start rolling out to users progressively. Please refer to the section about Firefox desktop above since the Firefox for Android release cycle is the same, and the comments concerning localization apply as well.

We’ve also recently decided to stop updating the What’s New content for Firefox Android (due to low visibility and interest in localizing this section, and the fact that it does not affect the number of downloads – amongst other things). This means the locales that were supported by the Play Store will no longer need to localize the updated version for Beta each time we are releasing a new version. Instead, we’ve opted for displaying a generic message.

On the Firefox iOS front, English from Canada (en-CA) was added to the ever-growing list of shipping locales with the new v12. Congratulations on that! Next update (and so, new strings) is slowly creeping up, so stay tuned for more.

Focus Android locales are also continuously growing, with Afrikaans (af), Pai-pai (pai), Punjabi (pa-IN), Quechua Chanka (quy) and Aymara (ay) teams having started to localize. Note that there are public Nightlies available on the Play Store that you can test your work on. Instructions on how to do that are here.

And finally, after months of silence localization-wise, Focus iOS will get new strings soon! However at the moment, we are not opening the project back up to new locales as there is no clearly defined schedule, and we cannot guarantee by when new locales can be added once completed.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Legal documentation:

  • An FAQ page on privacy and data collection practice at Mozilla will be made available for localization for all languages. This will come soon.
  • There are twelve locales that are identified as priority locales based on Firefox desktop user size: de, es-ES, fr, it, id, ja, nl, pl, pt-BR, ru, tr, zh-CN. This means Privacy Notice for key legal documents will be supported and updated in these languages at an ongoing basis. The rest of the previously supported locales will remain available, but will be redirected to English for the latest updated versions.
  • The Privacy landing page is going through a makeover. The right side panel will be revised by archiving documentations for EOL products.

Common Voice:

  • We launched multi-language voice collection in German, French, and Welsh
  • Since the launch in May, we have started collecting in 7 more languages, for a total of 11 languages
  • The site is now live in 41 locales, with 16 more on the way
  • After the San Francisco All Hands, a whole new contribution portal would be launched soon
  • In the near future, we will roll out a new Homepage, and a brand new User Profile section (with stats and leaderboard), so we will need lots of help localizing this!

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

Copyright campaign! The battle to fix copyright has started a few days ago, and while we were disappointed by the JURI Committee vote, we’re now mobilizing citizens to ask a larger group of MEPs to reject Article 13 during the EU Parliament plenary on July 5th. We can still win!

In the second half of 2018, the Advocacy team will have a bigger focus on both Europe and company misbehavior around data, so we can expect more campaigns being localized. It’s also an opportunity to mobilize internal resources to plan and build localization support on the new foundation website.

If you would like to learn more, you can watch Jon Lloyd, Advocacy Campaigns Manager, during the Foundation All-Hands in Toronto talk briefly about the recent campaign wins and the strategy for the next 6 month:

On fundraising, the current plan for the coming month is to communicate an update to existing donors, do various testing around it, then send a broader fundraising ask towards end of July/beginning of August. The donate website will soon get a makeover that will fix some layout issues with currencies, and generally provide more space for localization. Which is good news!

Several foundation website will also soon get a unified navigation header to match the one on foundation.mozilla.org.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Making unreviewed suggestions discoverable

Reviewing pending suggestions regularly is important and making them discoverable is the first step to get there. That’s why we got rid of the misleading Suggested count, which didn’t include suggestions to Translated strings, and started exposing Unreviewed suggestions in a new sortable column in dashboards. It’s represented by a lightbulb, which is painted blue if unreviewed suggestions are present.

Tags help you prioritize your work

To help you prioritize your work, we rolled out Tags. The idea is pretty simple: we define a set of tags with set priority, which are then assigned to translation resources (files). Effectively, that assigns priority to each string. Currently, tags are only enabled for Firefox, which you’ll notice by the Tags tab available in the Firefox localization dashboard and filters.

Pontoon Tools 3.2.0

Pontoon Tools is a must-have add-on for all Pontoon users, which allows you to stay up-to-date with localization activity even when you don’t use Pontoon. Michal Stanke just released a new version, which is now also available for Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. Additionally, it also brings support for the aforementioned Unreviewed state and enables system notifications by default.

Support for localizing WebExtensions

Extensions for Firefox are built using the WebExtensions API, a cross-browser system for developing extensions. The WebExtensions API has a rather handy module available for internationalizing extensions – i18n. It stores translations in messages.json files, which are now supported in Pontoon. For more technical details on internationalizing WebExtensions, see this MDN page.

Redesigning Pontoon homepage

As mentioned in the last month’s report, Pramit Singhi is working on Pontoon homepage redesign as part of the Google Summer of Code project. Based on the impressive amount of feedback collected during the research among Pontoon users, he came up with a proposal of the new homepage and would like to hear your thoughts. Please consider the proposal a wireframe, so he’s more interested in hearing what you think about the overall page structure and content and less so how you like fonts and colors.

Events

  • The French l10n team will be gathering in Paris at the end of July, to discuss many topics including improvements to the current localization and participation process to make it even more easy for newcomers, improvements to the team communication and do some training for the most recent team members. This event is part of our 2018 l10n community events, so don’t forget to start planning yours and make your request!
  • Indonesia (Jakarta): L10N-drivers are currently organizing a sprint with the local community, in order to add Javanese and Sundanese to Firefox Rocket shipping locales – and thus hopefully help expand our user base in Indonesia. Do you know anyone who would like to help localize in these two languages? Get in touch!
  • 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

Francis who speaks many languages, joined the l10n community not long ago, thanks to the Common Voice project. He has been actively involved in bringing new contributors and introduce new localization communities to Mozilla. He also makes sure the new contributors have a simple onboarding process so they can contribute right away and see the fruit of their work quickly. Additionally, Francis files issues and fixes bugs through the project on GitHub. Thank you!

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)!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

 

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve by reaching out to any one of the l10n-drivers listed above.

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