Mozilla Localization in 2023

A Year in Data

The Mozilla localization community had a busy and productive 2023. Let’s look at some numbers that defined our year:

• 32 projects and 258 locales set up in Pontoon
• 3,685 new user registrations
• 1,254 active users, submitting at least one translation (on average 235 users per month)
• 432,228 submitted translations
• 371,644 approved translations
• 23,866 new strings to translate

Thank you to all the volunteers who contributed to Mozilla’s localization efforts over the last 12 months!

In case you’re curious about the lion theme: localization is often referred to as l10n, a numeronym which looks like the word lion. That’s why our team’s logo is a lion head, stylized as the original Mozilla logo by artist Shepard Fairey.

Pontoon Development

A core area of focus in 2023 was pretranslation. From the start, our goal with this feature was to support the community by making it easier to leverage existing translations and provide a way to bootstrap translation of new content.

When pretranslation is enabled, any new string added in Pontoon will be pretranslated using a 100% match from translation memory or — if no match exists —  we’ll leverage Google AutoML Translation engine with a model custom trained on the existing locale’s translation memory. Translations are stored in Pontoon with a special “pretranslated” status so that localizers can easily find and review them. Pretranslated strings are also saved to repositories (e.g. GitHub), and eventually ship in the product.

You can find more details on how we approached testing and involved the community in this blog post from July. Over the course of 2023 we pretranslated 14,033 strings for 16 locales across 15 projects.

Towards the end of the year, we also worked on two features that have been long requested by users: 1) it’s now possible to use Pontoon with a light theme; and 2) we improved the translation experience on mobile, with the original 3-column layout adapting to smaller screen sizes.

Screenshot of Pontoon’s UI with the light theme selected.

Screenshot of Pontoon UI on a smartphone running Firefox for Android

Listening to user feedback remains our priority: in case you missed it, we have just published the results of a new survey, where we asked localizers which features they would like to see implemented in Pontoon. We look forward to implementing some of your fantastic ideas in 2024!

Community

Community is at the core of Mozilla’s localization model, so it’s crucial to identify sustainability issues as early as possible. Only relying on completion levels, or how quickly a locale can respond to urgent localization requests, are not sufficient inputs to really understand the health of a community. Indeed, an extremely dedicated volunteer can mask deeper problems and these issues only become visible — and urgent — when such a person leaves a project, potentially without a clear succession plan.

To prevent these situations, we’ve been researching ways to measure the health of each locale by analyzing multiple data points — for example, the number of new sign-ups actively contributing to localization and getting reviews from translators and managers — and we’ve started reaching out to specific communities to trial test interventions. With the help of existing locale managers, this resulted in several promotions to translator (Arabic, Czech, German) or even manager (Czech, Russian, Simplified Chinese).

During these conversations with various local communities, we heard loud and clear how important in-person meetings are to understanding what Mozilla is working on, and how interacting with other volunteers and building personal connections is extremely valuable. Over the past few years, some unique external factors — COVID and an economic recession chief among them — made the organization of large scale events challenging. We investigated the feasibility of small-scale, local events organized directly by community members, but this initiative wasn’t successful since it required a significant investment of time and energy by localizers on top of the work they were already doing to support Mozilla with product localization.

To counterbalance the lack of in-person events and keep volunteers in the loop, we organized two virtual fireside chats for localizers in May and November (links to recordings).

What’s coming in 2024

In order to strengthen our connection with existing and potential volunteers, we’re planning to organize regular online events this year. We intend to experiment with different formats and audiences for these events, while also improving our presence on social networks (did you know we’re on Mastodon?). Keep an eye out on this blog and Matrix for more information in the coming months.

As many of you have asked in the past, we also want to integrate email functionalities in Pontoon; users should be able to opt in to receive specific communications via email on top of in-app notifications. We also plan to experiment with automated emails to re-engage inactive users with elevated permissions (translators, managers).

It’s clear that a community can only be sustainable if there are active managers and translators to support new contributors. On one side, we will work to create onboarding material for new volunteers so that existing managers and translators can focus on the linguistic aspects. On the other, we’ll engage the community to discuss a refined set of policies that foster a more inclusive and transparent environment. For example, what should the process be when a locale doesn’t have a manager or active translator, yet there are contributors not receiving reviews? How long should an account retain elevated permissions if it’s apparently gone silent? What are the criteria for promotions to translator or manager roles?

For both initiatives, we will reach out to the community for feedback in the coming months.

As for Pontoon, you can expect some changes under the hood to improve performances and overall reliability, but also new user-facing features (e.g. fine-grained search, better translation memory management).

Thank you!

We want to thank all the volunteers who have dedicated their time and skills to localizing Mozilla products. Your tireless efforts are essential in advancing the Mozilla mission of fostering an open and accessible internet for everyone.

Looking ahead, we are excited about the opportunities that 2024 brings. We look forward to working alongside our community to expand the impact of localization and continue breaking down language barriers. Your support is invaluable, and together, we will continue shaping a more inclusive digital world. Thank you for being an integral part of this journey.