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
Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!
We also want to welcome Ayanaa Rahman to the localization team. She’s joining us for an internship as a backend software engineer, and you’ll see her active primarily around Pontoon. Here’s a few words from her:
Hi all, I’m Ayanaa Rahman. I recently completed my third year studying Computer Science at the University of Toronto. I have also worked at financial institutions in both the US & Canada as a Software Developer intern, focusing on automation and big data.
Born into an immigrant family and raised in the multicultural city of Toronto, I’ve been exposed to multiple languages and cultures throughout my life. This experience has highlighted the importance of effective communication across different languages, particularly to enhance people’s digital experiences. I am eager to leverage my background and skills to make a meaningful contribution to the Mozilla community.
New content and projects
What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop
Firefox 113, shipping to release users on May 9, is going to include a new locale: Tajik (tg). Huge thanks to Victor Ibragimov, the locale manager, and all other community members for achieving such an impressive result. Victor has been amazing over the last months, both online and offline, in finding resources and promoting the Tajik language.
In terms of new features, developers are currently working on the workflow to import data from other browsers, and we expect an overall increase in the number of strings around messaging and onboarding. Keep an eye out on notifications in Pontoon for updated testing instructions.
Fonts and fingerprinting
Firefox developers are working on reducing the ability for websites to track users based on their browser “fingerprint”, and fonts are one of the characteristics that bad actors can use to uniquely identify your browser.
By restricting access to only fonts pre-installed with the operating system, this form of fingerprinting becomes much less effective. The challenge is that it could impair the experience for users that access content in other languages, as they might rely on fonts installed through other systems (e.g. OS language packs).
Given how large the number of possible scenarios is, the team working on this feature needs help from the localization community to ensure user experience is not degraded. This document contains detailed information about the feature, how to test it and how to report errors.
What’s new or coming up in mobile
Things have been moving quite a bit in mobile land since our last report in January – especially with the past couple of versions leading up to the next v114 (in Nightly right now) – which all feature some notable updates.
A reminder that the last day to get translations in for version 114 is May 28 (all strings for this version should have landed by May 5th approximately).
One thing you may have noticed are the experiments going on these days both in Firefox desktop and mobile (often labeled as “Nimbus” in localization comments and string IDs). For mobile, we have been playing around with onboarding cards, as we suggest new users to change their default mobile browsers to Firefox.
Other notable updates are:
- Users can now choose whether to be asked every time they open a link that would open in another app
- Websites that use window.print() can now be printed in Firefox for Android
- Improvements to Credit Card Autofill
- Cookie Banner Reduction/Blocking: this new feature aims at providing users a seamless browsing experience by drastically minimizing cookie banner annoyance while also delivering the most private and secure option to handling the cookie banners
Now on to some community highlights: on mobile, Tajik (tg) has recently shipped at 100% complete translation on Focus for Android browser, making it the third browser available to Tajik speakers: Firefox for desktop, Firefox for Android, and now Focus for Android. As mentioned previously in this newsletter, congratulations to Victor and his team for sustaining this work – and the community – across the board! We look forward to the local initiatives taking place in Tajikistan in the near future, expanding the open, free and accessible internet in the region.
Amharic (am) has also recently shipped entirely localized versions of Firefox for Android, Focus for Android and Focus for iOS. Congratulations to the team who has worked relentlessly on keeping these projects up to date as well as growing the community.
Sardinian (sc) also recently initiated and completed Firefox for Android localization, as an ongoing effort in their existing projects. And Persian (fa) locale has been ramping up with projects thanks to locale manager Reza and fellow translator MSKF.
We want to take the opportunity to remind folks that Firefox for Android has an in-app language switcher, which works independently from the native Android OS language options. It generally supports a larger set of languages than the Android system language settings does. Head over to your Firefox for Android “Settings > Language” to discover 100+ languages available. (Taking the opportunity to note that a language switcher also exists within the Mozilla VPN settings, which seems to be a feature overlooked by many).
What’s new or coming up in web projects
Relay Website
As you may have noticed, the app.ftl file is no longer in Pontoon. In place are multiple, feature oriented files. The goal is to make each file more modular so it gives more context where strings land in the product. And it also offers flexibility to provide regional specific strings. There will be a few more of these efforts in the future. If the strings were localized prior to the migration, they are already moved to the new file, including contribution history. No need to go in to retranslate them. If there are untranslated strings, they are brand new strings.
Mozilla.org
This is a heads-up. A few pages from the Relay Website project will be migrated to mozilla.org. Pages to be migrated include faq.ftl and landing.ftl. Like the previous migrations, the Pontoon team will do their best to preserve the work you did, including attributes to each of the localized strings, approved or pending for review. For locales that have not localized the Relay product, you will see an increase in untranslated strings. You can prioritize these sets of files against others.
The migration is scheduled to be complete before the next l10n report. The purpose of this migration is for better search ranking. A link to the Relay pages will be added to the navigation bar.
Firefox Accounts
The Firefox accounts team are undergoing work to improve the user experience around account authentication and data recovery. Some changes are already in progress, and going forward you should see more strings related to two factor authentication, account recovery, password resets, and more. Many of these changes can be viewed before changes go to staging or production by checking Storybooks which can show English strings in context. The link to Storybooks can be found under the resources section of Firefox Accounts within Pontoon.
What’s new or coming up in SUMO
- Check out the SUMO Sprint wikipage for Firefox 113 to learn more about how you can help with this release.
- Watch the recording of our community call in March if you haven’t already to learn more about SUI (Simplified User Interface) screenshot that Lucas shared.
- It’s also highly recommended to watch our community call in April to catch up on the result of the contributor survey we’ve done in Q1.
- If you’re a Social Support or Mobile Store Support contributor, make sure to watch the contributor forum to get updates about queue stats every week. Kiki will post the update by the end of the week to make sure that you’re updated. Here’s the latest one from last week.
- You can now learn more about Kitsune releases by following this Discourse topic.
What’s new or coming up in Pontoon
Pretranslation
We have successfully completed the Alpha testing phase of the Pretranslation feature with the Italian and Slovenian locale. The results[1], especially when accounting for the bugs fixed during the testing period, were quite promising:
- 65.10% pretranslated strings were approved without changes.
- 94.61% were manually reviewed as “usable”.
- The average chrF++ score was 92.97
Between April and June 2023, Pontoon Pretranslation feature will be in the Beta testing phase with a total of 9 participating locales. In case of a success, we expect to make the feature available to more locales soon after. Stay tuned!
[1] Data has been revised after this post was first published. During the Beta testing we discovered an error in the way data was calculated, and applied the same fixes to the data collected during Alpha testing.
New contributions
Thanks to our army of awesome contributors for recent improvements to our codebase:
- Willian, who joined the project last year, landed 10 additional patches(!) recently, including making the All contributions view the new default view on the Profile page.
- Ivan added support for reading project configurations from the repository. (Ivan, sorry it took forever to review it!)
- Uriel added support for implicit TLS emails.
Newly published localizer facing documentation
We have neglected our Pontoon documentation for a long time, and unfortunately it shows. We’re actively working on updating it, and we plan to wrap this project by the end of June.
Events
Localization “Fireside Chat”: come join us on Wednesday May 10, at 9am PT, where we will answer any questions you may have concerning updates contained in this localization report. This is the first time the localization-drivers try out this type of event, and we will accommodate for more timezones in the next iteration. It will take place on AirMozilla, and is open to anyone interested.
In the meantime you can check out our blog and visit past reports here.
Stay tuned on Discourse or in our Matrix channel for more info coming out soon!
Start asking questions here (or in this pad). You can also drop questions in the comments section of this blog post. Note that during the event, you will be able to ask more questions on our Matrix channel, and we will address them live if time permits.
Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Contact us and we’ll include it.
Friends of the Lion
Image by Elio Qoshi
- Thanks to all locale managers and translators who are helping us to test the Pretranslation feature in Pontoon. The locales currently involved are: cy, de, es-AR, fr, hu, id, it, sl, zh-TW. Your help, on top of what you’re doing every day to support Mozilla, is very much appreciated.
- Kudos to Aderajew and Bantegize who single-handedly revived the Amharic community in a span of a few months! They completed the localization of a few mobile projects, and are making progress weekly on the mozilla.org project. Between the two of them, they split the tasks of what they each do best: localizing the products but also looking for new contributors, building up the community. Way to go!
- Parvez and Abass led the effort in completing several high priority projects for Saraiki, including Firefox desktop, mobile products for Android, and mozilla.org.
Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact us and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out!
Useful Links
- #l10n-community channel on Element (chat.mozilla.org)
- Localization category on Discourse
- L10n blog
Questions? Want to get involved?
If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:
- Bryan – l10n Project Manager
- Delphine – l10n Project Manager for mobile
- Peiying (CocoMo) – l10n Project Manager for mozilla.org, marketing, and legal
- Francesco Lodolo (flod) – l10n Project Manager for desktop
- Théo Chevalier – l10n Project Manager for Mozilla Foundation
- Matjaž (mathjazz) – Pontoon dev
- Eemeli – Pontoon, Fluent dev
Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve it.
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