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L10n report: December edition

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Hi everyone and welcome to the December 2018 Mozilla l10n report!

Before getting into the individual updates, I wanted to call out that the Mozilla All Hands was held last week in Orlando, FL. For our part, we made progress on conversations with different marketing groups, mozilla.org engineers, and Open Innovation about standardizing the l10n process for each of their types of content requiring translation. We also had a few cross-organization discussions about Fluent in Firefox and the Multilingual Firefox project. Plans for 2019, on an organization level, are still being finalized and are too early to share at the moment, but we look forward to opportunities to share those plans once they’re ready.

Thank you for a full year of donating your time to localize Mozilla projects. We’re incredibly grateful to get to work with you and look forward to accomplishing more together next year!

Welcome!

New localizers

  • Arabic: Tony Issa joined us through the Common Voice project.

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

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Firefox 64 has been officially released on December 11. As a localizer, it’s important to  remember that there’s a strict deadline to ship updates in the next official version of Firefox, and that’s about 2 weeks before the release date (Nov 27 for Firefox 64). The deadline to ship updates to translations in Firefox 65 will be January 15.

In general, the best approach is to localize Nightly periodically, and use Nightly in your daily browsing to test your work (it’s updated twice a day). If you can’t, then targeting the very beginning of the beta cycle is a good alternative, to leave a few weeks for testing on Beta, and get as many eyes as possible on the localized version.

As for Firefox 65 and 66, while the migration to Fluent proceeds, the main focus – and source of strings – still remains testing and improving tracking protection features and security error pages.

Firefox 65 will include an exciting and brand new feature for multilingual users, but we’ll talk about it in a dedicated blog post with all the details.

What’s new or coming up in Test Pilot

Be on the lookout for an important announcement about Test Pilot in the coming days.

 

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Just like for Firefox desktop, please keep an eye out for getting your localizations in before the deadline for the Firefox for Android 65 version (next up is January 15). See the section above for more details.

Firefox Reality v1.1 is now localized in a small subset of languages. We’ll be expanding to more locales for the upcoming release (timeline TBD). Stay tuned!

We have exciting news about Lockbox, your preferred password manager: it’s coming to Android very soon too! We will be getting strings for localization over the course of January. Stay tuned for an update about this early in 2019. And the iOS version won’t be very far behind in terms of l10n 🙂

There are also some imminent changes coming to Pontoon and native strings.xml support. As in: it will exist \o/ Please keep an eye out as we’ll be announcing these changes in detail very soon as well.

 

What’s new or coming up in web projects

The Community Participation Guidelines (or CPG) have been recently updated. Included in the updates are ways to report intolerable behaviors. These two pages are localized in a few languages, and is done through an agency and funded by the D&I team. If you feel the need to have these two pages localized in your languages in order to better understand the guidelines, send a request through Pontoon.

Common Voice has turned on voice collection for 16 languages after each of the languages reached the major milestones of completing the website localization and collecting 5000 sentences! This number is continuing to grow because of your support!

Mozilla.org: if you and the community have not had the bandwidth to work on this project due to competing demand from projects in the last few months, December, usually a slower month, might be the time to do some catch-up: translate and review the suggestions. The landing page for a few locales is now redirected to English. Focus first on this and other core pages with 5-star rating. If you need help to prioritize, let l10n-drivers know.

 

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

The Mozilla Foundation has an impact goal for 2019! “Better Machine Decision Making”. More specifically, the draft goal description is that “We all understand when machines are making decisions for us — and about us. We have a way to work alongside them and correct them if they make mistakes.”

60% of the resources of the foundation will be dedicated towards this goal next year, so you can expect it to show up in multiple initiatives. How it shows up in the foundation work will evolve, and it is intended to be broad for now. For Advocacy, fighting misinformation in Europe, as well as asking Facebook for more transparency will be key. And a few languages will be key to this work.

On this topic, those of you who read the l10n report last month may have noticed that the Misinfo test campaign didn’t happen early November as expected. The team wasn’t confident enough about the early campaign ideas, so it was decided to cancel them in favor of working directly towards the first big campaigns of 2019.

Quoting an extract of the latest fundraising email to give you an overview of the incoming campaign around the EU elections, the plan is to:

  • Use market-leading research to deliver powerful grassroots-led campaigns.
  • Build coalitions of like-minded organizations, so we can work together to build public support for stronger regulations to support a healthy internet.
  • Support the promotion and distribution of anti-disinformation tools that empower everyday people to protect themselves.

Speaking about fundraising, it’s crunch time! The last two emails of the year should be exposed by early next week, and this will allow the team to raise money until the very end of the year! Thanks for all the efforts so far!

 

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

Matching Firefox Desktop locales. With the upcoming changes to the amount of localization projects in Pontoon in 2019, we are adding all the currently served Firefox Desktop locales as available ones for support.mozilla.org’s user interface, as serviced through Pontoon. Starting from 2019, they will also be available as article content locales for localization at http://support.mozilla.org/. To learn more about localizing the Support wiki, visit this page.

Rewriting contribution documentation for localization. Speaking of which, the documentation helping new localization contributors get started (and experienced contributors keep their skills fresh) will undergo an extensive rewrite in Q1 2019. If you are interesting in reviewing the new documentation before it goes live, contact Michał.

New content ready for localization [Firefox 64]. With the new release, a slew of articles has been updated and is ready for community localization:

 

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Extending TM support. Until recently, querying for strings longer than 255 characters in Pontoon’s Translation Memory didn’t work at all. While the portion of such strings isn’t too large, the longer the string, the more time can be saved if TM can be used. This limitation has now been dropped. That means Pontoon now shows perfect and fuzzy matches from Translation Memory for all strings, regardless of their length. Kudos to Jotes for the patch!

Request a language from project page. Your team page allows you to request new projects to be enabled for your locale. From now on you can make similar request from project pages. Let’s say you are on the Firefox Monitor Add-On page. Click on Request new language, pick a language and you’re to send a request to project managers. Thanks to Vishal for implementing this feature!

Native Support for Android l10n. We’ve landed support for String resources, an XML-based file format used for localizing Android applications. Most of the functionality is provided by the compare-locales library, which provides the strings.xml parser and serializer, as well as the quality checks. Native support for Android l10n infrastructure is a welcome addition for developers, who will no longer need to convert localization files to other file formats, e.g. Gettext PO.

Support for l10n project configuration files. Another step towards making developers’ lives easier is support for the so called project config. Until recently, Pontoon required project repositories to follow a particular directory structure in order to be able to detect localization files. That can be tedious in some scenarios and could require developers to change file structure during the during build process. By specifying file paths in project configuration files, which are now supported by Pontoon, projects can now use virtually any file structure and Pontoon will be able to support it.

Improving the review process. We’re hosting a community event in Paris this weekend, where we’ll design a new review process for community localization at Mozilla. One area we’d like to improve in particular is communication between reviewers and translators. We’ll spend a good amount of time brainstorming, sketching, prototyping and user testing. Stay tuned for more updates soon!

 

Events

  • Southeast Asia Community Meetup in Hanoi, Vietnam on November 17-18.
  • Sonia Singla of Punjabi locale mobilized university friends and made significant progress in several projects at a meetup on November 18-19.
  • 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)

Accomplishments

Localization impact by the numbers:

  • Firefox Lite marketing campaigns in Southeast Asia:
    • Reach 1 Million installs in 2018 December!
    • Avg MAUs grow 13 times from November 2017 (44,192) to December 2018 (595,878).
    • Star rating is 4.6, the highest rating among all mozilla Apps.
    • Created a viral referral campaign; install volume increased more than 100X in a few hours.
  • Email Marketing:
    • de: 7+ million emails reached to 748,524 subscribers
    • es: 7.8+ million emails reached to 1,241,631 subscribers
    • fr: 5.5+ million emails reached to 1,010,602 subscribers
    • id: 1+ million emails reached to 244,777 subscribers
    • pl: 1.2+ million emails reached to 232,215 subscribers
    • pt: 3.2+ million emails reached to 761,388 subscribers
    • ru:  1+ million emails reached to 214,988 subscribers
  • Email:
    • The most successful campaign we’ve run this year:  The Firefox Accounts CTA email (this is the email that asks people to create a Firefox Account after they’ve signed up for Firefox emails).
      • Average Open Rate for the Interest/Learning emails: 24.08% (compared to average open rate across different industries: 17%-25%
      • Current conversion rate: 53% the people who received this email created a Firefox Account!
  • F100 Snippets:
    • Has an average reach of 1.6 Billion impressions in Q2 2018
    • Has 1.6 Million additional quarterly clicks for every .01% increase in click through rate

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact on 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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