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L10n Report: August 2020 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. 

As you are probably aware, Mozilla just went through a massive round of layoffs. About 250 people were let go, reducing the overall size of the workforce by a quarter. The l10n-drivers team was heavily impacted, with Axel Hecht (aka Pike) leaving the company.

We are still in the process of understanding how the reorganization will affect our work and the products we localize. A first step was to remove some projects from Pontoon, and we’ll make sure to communicate any further changes in our communication channels.

Telegram channel and Matrix

The “bridge” between our Matrix and Telegram channel, i.e. the tool synchronizing content between the two, has been working only in one direction for a few weeks. For this reason, and given the unsupported status of this tool, we decided to remove it completely.

As of now:

  • Our Telegram and Matrix channels are completely independent from each other.
  • The l10n-community channel on Matrix is the primary channel for synchronous communications. The reason for this is that Matrix is supported as a whole by Mozilla, offering better moderation options among other things, and can be easily accessed from different platforms (browser, phone).

If you haven’t used Matrix yet, we encourage you to set it up following the instructions available in the Mozilla Wiki. You can also set an email address in your profile, to receive notifications (like pings) when you’re offline.

We plan to keep the Telegram channel around for now, but we might revisit this decision in the future.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Upcoming deadlines:

  • Firefox 81 is currently in beta and will be released on September 22nd. The deadline to update localization is on September 8.

In terms of content and new features, most of the changes are around the new modal print preview, which can be currently tested on Nightly.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

The new Firefox for Android has been rolled out at 100%! You should therefore have either been upgraded from the older version (or will be in just a little bit) – or you can download it directly from the Play Store here.

Congratulations to everyone who has made this possible!

For the next Firefox for Android release, we are expecting string freeze to start towards the end of the week, which will give localizers two weeks to complete localizing and testing.

Concerning Firefox for iOS: v29 strings have been exposed on Pontoon. We are still working out screenshots for testing with iOS devs at the moment, but these should be available soon and as usual from the Pontoon project interface.

On another note, and as mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, due to the recent lay-offs, we have had to deactivate some projects from Pontoon. The mobile products are currently: Scryer, Firefox Lite and Lockwise iOS. More may be added to this list soon, so stay tuned. Once more, thanks to all the localizers who have contributed their time and effort to these projects across the years. Your help has been invaluable for Mozilla.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Common Voice

The Common Voice team is greatly impacted due to the changes in recent announcement. The team has stopped the two-week sprint cycle and is working in a maintenance mode right now. String updates and new language requests would take longer time to process due to resource constraints

Some other changes to the project before the reorg:

  • New site name https://commonvoice.mozilla.org; All traffic from the old domain will be forwarded to the new domain automatically.
  • New GitHub repo name mozilla/common-voice and new branch name main. All traffic to the previous domain voice-web will be forwarded directly to the new repo, but you may need to manually update your git remote if you have a local copy of the site running.

Mozilla.org

An updated firefox/welcome/page4.ftl with new layout will be ready for localization in a few days. The turnaround time is rather short. Be on the lookout for it.

Along with this update is the temporary page called banners/firefox-daylight-launch.ftl that promotes Fenix. It has a life of a few weeks. Please localize it as soon as possible. Once done, you will see the localized banner on https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ on production.

The star priority ratings in Pontoon are also revised. The highest priority pages are firefox/all.ftl, firefox/new/*.ftl, firefox/whatsnew/*.ftl, and brands.ftl. The next level priority pages are the shared files. Unless a page has a hard deadline to complete, the rest are normal priority with a 3-star rating and you can take time to localize them.

WebThings Gateway

The team is completely dissolved due to the reorg. At the moment, the project would not take any new language requests or update the repo with changes in Pontoon. The project is actively working to move into a community-maintained state. We will update everyone as soon as that information becomes available.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

The Foundation website homepage got a major revamp, strings have been exposed to the relevant locales in the Engagement and Foundation website projects. There’s no strict deadline, you can complete this anytime. The content will be published live regularly, with a first push happening in a few days.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Download Terminology as TBX

We’ve added the ability to download Terminology from Pontoon in the standardized TBX file format, which allows you to exchange it with other users and systems. To access the feature, click on your user icon in the top-right section of the translation workspace and select “Download Terminology”.

Improving Machinery with SYSTRAN

We have an update on the work we’ve been doing with SYSTRAN to provide you with better machine translation options in Pontoon.

SYSTRAN has published three NMT models (German, French, and Spanish) based on contributions of Mozilla localizers. They are available in the SYSTRAN Marketplace as free and open source and accessible to any existing SYSTRAN NMT customers. In the future, we hope to make those models available beyond the SYSTRAN system.

These models have been integrated with Pontoon and are available in the Machinery tab. Please report any feedback that you have for them, as we want to make sure these are a useful resource for your contributions.

We’ll be working with SYSTRAN to learn how to build the models for new language pairs in 2021, which should widely expand the language coverage.

Search with Enter

From now on you need to press Enter to trigger search in the string list. This change unifies the behaviour of the string list search box and the Machinery search box, which despite similar looks previously hadn’t worked the same way. Former had been searching after the last keystroke (with a 500 ms delay), while latter after Enter was pressed.

Search on every keystroke is great when it’s fast, but string list search is not always fast. It becomes really tedious if more than 500 ms pass between the keystrokes and search gets triggered too early.

Events

  • 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)

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.

2 comments on “L10n Report: August 2020 Edition”

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  1. John wrote on

    I’m surprised nobody’s brought this up here yet, But after spending an hour or so yesterday trying to figure out your new browser on Android, I went ahead and uninstalled the thing, after using Firefox for years. Looking at all the one star reviews that have been showing up on google’s play store, I doubt I’m the only one. The new version is absolutely terrible, and I encourage you to read the reviews, because there are lots of people detailing everything wrong with the app better than I ever could. I’ll check back in a few weeks to see if there’s been any improvement, and I’m still using your desktop browser (though I made damn sure to disable automatic updates after what happened on mobile), but as it is it looks like I’ll have to get used to chrome until I find something better.

    Reply

    1. Jeff Beatty wrote on

      Hi John, no one has likely brought it up here because there are better forums for offering this type of feedback. This blog is about supporting language communities to produce Firefox and other products in their languages. I suggest you follow the primary Mozilla blog, join conversations in Discourse, and file bugs about specific issues in bugzilla. Those are the right places for this.

      Reply

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