Categories: L10n Reports Planet

L10n Report: April 2020 Edition

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. 

Before we get into the report, we must share that Youghourta Benali, one of the Arabic l10n community’s managers, has passed away due to prior health issues. He was a passionate activist for the open Web and Arabic’s presence on the Web, localizing Mozilla projects for over 7 years. We’ll all miss him and wish his family and friends peace at this time. The surviving Arabic managers are currently writing a guest post that we’ll post here when ready.

Welcome!

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

New community/locales added

Other updates

Enforcing 2 factors authentication in GitHub for mozilla-l10n

As recently communicated in our mailing lists, on April 27 we will enforce the 2 factor authentication (2FA) in GitHub for the mozilla-l10n organization.

If you are part of the mozilla-l10n organization, but don’t have 2FA enabled, you will be automatically removed. This won’t prevent you from opening pull requests or filing issues, for example, and you will be able to rejoin (if you want) after enabling 2FA.

As explained in the original announcement, a lot has changed since we started using GitHub for Mozilla Localization, almost 5 years ago. We have consolidated contribution paths to l10n to Pontoon, and having direct access to repositories is not necessary anymore. Write access is already not allowed for some repositories, since formats are not user-friendly and can be properly managed only through localization tools.

For more information about enabling 2FA in GitHub, refer to this document.

Call to clean up Pontoon projects

We have seen that Pontoon contains a handful of projects per community that receive a lot of unreviewed translations. Many of these are low priority projects that the active and core community members have not contributed to in around a year. We’re asking locale managers to review their list of enabled projects in Pontoon and select projects you’re all willing to deactivate. We will be communicating with managers shortly to determine which projects we should deactivate for your locale.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Upcoming deadlines:

  • Firefox 76 is currently in beta and will be released on May 5. The deadline to update localization has just passed (April 21).
  • The deadline to update localizations for Firefox 77, currently in Nightly, will be May 19 (4 weeks after the previous deadline).

As explained in previous editions of the l10n report, In terms of localization priority and deadlines, note that the content of the What’s new panel, available at the bottom of the hamburger menu, doesn’t follow the release train. For example, content for 76 has been exposed on April 15, but it will be possible to update translations until the very end of the cycle, beyond the normal deadline for that version. You can find these strings in the asrouter.ftl file in Pontoon.

To test on Nightly:

  • Type about:config in the address bar and press enter. Click the button to accept the risk and continue.
  • Search for browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.asrouter.devtoolsEnabled and make sure that it’s set to true (double click it if it’s false). This will enable a new wrench icon in the New Tab page.
  • Search for browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.asrouter.useRemoteL10n and set it to false. This will force the browser to use translations available in the build, instead of translations hosted remotely (those are updated less frequently). It’s important to use Nightly and not Beta for this.
  • Open a New Tab, click on the wrench icon in the top right corner. This should open the about:newtab#devtools page. On the left sidebar, click on What’s New Panel, then click the button Open What’s New Panel.

There is also a new warning for vulnerable passwords in about:logins. You can find information on how to trigger this warning in this page.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Firefox iOS

  • The l10n cycle for Firefox for iOS v25 ends 27 April.
  • New screenshots have been added to the project landing page in Pontoon.

Fenix

The Fenix launch continues to be a high priority for Mozilla. The date of that launch will depend on the outcome of a handful of experiments. In the meantime, string updates should be minimal, and we continue to aim for shipping all locales that are present on Fennec.

Milestones

  • Feature complete date: to be announced when set
  • Source string freeze date: to be announced when set
  • Localized string freeze date: estimated to be July
  • Fenix launch date: no sooner than July

Current progress

  • Current average Fenix completion percentage across all locales: 74% (1% increase)
  • Target average completion percentage across all locales: 90%

Just a reminder, you can find the Fenix Nightly builds in the Google Play Store for testing your localization. Please take the time to test! Your language will appear in the app settings once you begin localizing the project in Pontoon and the Fenix team imports your locale into the build process. If you don’t localize the project, your language will not appear in the builds. Please note that at least Android 5 is necessary to use and test Fenix on an Android device.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org

There have been a few updates since the last report. The following two are new:

  • firefox/whatsnew_76.lang: the page is due on 26 April for these locales: de, en-CA, en-GB, and fr. Other locales are nice to have, with a fallback to WNP.
  • firefox/enterprise/index.lang.

Legal Documentation

The following languages for the Common Voice project have reached the milestones that require legal documents for Privacy Notice and Terms of Use. They are still in the work as we speak. If you are interested in reviewing them, the documents will be ready by early next week. Please note, any review feedback requires a peer review before being pushed to production.

Newly added languages: Abkhaz, Arabic, Assamese, Greek, Czech, Frisian, Indonesian, Japanese, Latvian, Maltese, Punjabi (India), Polish, Portuguese (pt-BR), Romansh (for Romansh Sursilvan & Romansh Vallader), Romanian, Slovenian, and Ukrainian

Events

We planned to organize multilocale workshops again for this year. With country closures, COVID-19 outbreaks, and the long road to economic recovery for industries we rely on for the logistics of these events, we have decided to cancel these workshops for 2020. We’re working to figure out a suitable replacement for these in-person events in 2020, stay tuned. We will revisit in October to determine what we can do for 2021.

As you’ve seen from the Mozilla Reps, they’ve made some changes to the event funding process to respect local effects of COVID-19. Effectively, if your local government has issued a quarantine or shelter-in-place order, please respect those orders and cancel your Fenix l10n hackathon. If that does not apply to you, you can still organize a local hackathon. I have created an event in the new community portal for Fenix localization. If you would like to organize a local l10n hackathon in the coming weeks to bring your locale to 100% complete, please reach out to a Resource Rep. Budget requests from Resource Reps for under USD$100 will be fast-tracked for approval.

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.

One comment on “L10n Report: April 2020 Edition”

Post a comment

  1. Michael Wolf wrote on

    Finally, the locale switcher is included in Firefox Preview 4.3 now and Firefox Preview can be used in languages that are not supported by Android.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *