L10n Report: July 2022 Edition

Matjaž Horvat

No responses yet

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!

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

While the last months have been pretty quiet in terms of new content for Firefox, we’re approaching a new major release for 2022, and that will include new features and dedicated onboarding.

Part of the content has already started landing in the last days, expect more in the coming weeks. In the meantime, make sure to check out the feature name guidelines for Firefox View and Colorways.

In terms of upcoming deadlines: Firefox 104 is currently in Beta and it will be possible to update translations up to August 14.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Mobile releases now align more closely to desktop release schedules, so you may notice that target dates for these projects are the same in Pontoon. As with desktop, things are quiet now for mobile, but we’ll be seeing more strings landing in the coming weeks for the next major release.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Firefox Relay website & add-on

We’re expanding Firefox Relay Premium into new locales across Europe: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. In order to deliver a truly great experience to our users in these new locales, we would like to make sure that users can utilize our products in the language they feel most comfortable with. Having these languages localized will take already complex topics like privacy and security and help connect more with users and offer them greater protections.

If you don’t see the product offered in the language in the markets above, maybe you can help by requesting to localize the product. Thank you for helping spread the word.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

  • When 100% TM match is available, it now automatically appears in the editor if the string doesn’t have any translations yet.

    100% matches from Translation Memory now automatically appear in the editor

  • Before new users make their first contribution to a locale, they are now provided with guidelines. And when they submit their first suggestion, team managers get notified.

    Tooltip with guidelines for new contributors.

  • The Contributors page on the Team dashboard has been reorganized. Contributors are grouped by their role within the team, which makes it easier to identify and reach out to team managers.

    Team contributors grouped by role.

  • We have introduced a new list parameter in translate view URLs, which allows for presenting a selected list of strings in the sidebar.
  • Deadlines have been renamed to Target Dates.
  • Thanks to Eemeli for making a bunch of under-the-hood improvements, which make our codebase much easier to build on.

Events

Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Contact us and we’ll include it.

Friends of the Lion

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

Questions? Want to get involved?

If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve it.

Introducing Pretranslation in Pontoon

Matjaž Horvat

No responses yet

In the coming months we’ll begin rolling out the Pretranslation feature in Pontoon.

Pretranslation is the process of using translation memory and machine translation systems to translate content before it is edited by translators. It is intended to speed up the translation process and ease the work of translators.

How it works

Pretranslation will be off by default and only enabled for a selected list of locales within selected projects by the L10n Program Managers.

When enabled, each string without any translations will be automatically pretranslated using the 100% match from translation memory or (should that not be available) using the machine translation engine. If there are multiple 100% matches in TM, the one which has been used the most times will be used.

Pretranslations will be assigned a new translation status – Pretranslated. That will allow translators to distinguish them from community submitted translations and suggestions, and make them easier to review and postedit.

The important bit is that pretranslations will be stored to version control systems immediately, which means the postediting step will take place after translations might have already shipped in the product.

Machine translation engines

We have evaluated several different options and came to conclusion that the following scenario works best for our use case:

  • If your locale is supported by the Google AutoML Translation, we’ll use that service and train the engine using the Mozilla translation data sets, which will result in better translation quality than what’s currently suggested in the Machinery tab by generic MT engines.
  • For other locales we’ll use Google Translation API or similar engines.

Get involved

We are in the early stages of the feature rollout. We’re looking for teams that would like to test the feature within a pilot project. If you’re a locale manager and want to opt in, please send an email to pontoon-team@mozilla.com and we’ll add your locale to our list of early adopters.

L10n Report: April 2022 Edition

Delphine

No responses yet

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!

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 100 is now in beta, and will be released on May 3, 2022. The deadline to update localization is April 24.

As part of this release, users will see a special celebration message.

You can test this dialog by:

  • Opening about:welcome in Nightly.
  • Copying and pasting the following code in the Browser Console:
    Cc["@mozilla.org/browser/browserglue;1"].getService().wrappedJSObject._showUpgradeDialog()

If you’re not familiar with the Browser Console, take a look at these old instructions to set it up, then paste the command provided above.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Just like Firefox desktop, v100 is right around the corner for mobile.

  • Firefox for Android and Focus for Android: deadline is April 27.
  • Firefox for iOS and Focus for iOS: deadline is April 24.

Some strings landed late in the cycle – but everything should have arrived by now.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Relay Website and add-on

The next release is on April 19th. This release includes new strings along with massive updates to both projects thanks to key terminology changes:

  • alias to mask
  • domain to subdomain
  • real email to true email

To learn more about the change, please check out this Discourse post. If you can’t complete the updates by the release date, there will be subsequent updates soon after the deadline so your work will be in production soon. Additionally, the obsolete strings will be removed once the products have caught up with the updates in most locales.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Review notifications

We added a notification for suggestion reviews, so you’ll now know when your suggestions have been accepted or rejected. These notifications are batched and sent daily.

Changes to Fuzzy strings

Soon, we’ll be making changes to the way we treat Fuzzy strings. Since they aren’t used in the product, they’ll be displayed as Missing. You will no longer find Fuzzy strings on the dashboards and in the progress charts. The Fuzzy filter will be moved to Extra filters. You’ll still see the yellow checkmark in the History panel to indicate that a particular translation is Fuzzy.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

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)

Friends of the Lion

Image by Elio Qoshi

  • Thanks to everybody on the TCP/ETP contributor focus group. You’re all amazing and the Customer Experience team can’t thank you enough for everyone’s collaboration on the project.

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

  • If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

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.

L10n Report: February 2022 Edition

Peiying Mo

2 responses

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!

New community/locales added

  • Tok: Toki Pona

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Things have been quiet in terms of new content, while Firefox is quickly approaching version 100.

  • Firefox 98 is currently in beta, and localization will be possible until February 27.
  • Firefox 99 is now shipping in nightly, and will move to beta on March 8.

We expect to have more substantial content updates in the coming months.

Unfortunately, it’s not all good news. There are a few locales, shipping in the release channel, that have been struggling to keep up, and are falling behind:

  • Afrikaans (af)
  • Macedonian (mk)
  • Sinhala (si)
  • Songhay (son)
  • Xhosa (xh)

If you speak one of these languages and want to help, please don’t hesitate to get in touch to learn how you can contribute.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Things are starting to move around again in mobile land, after a small calm period. You can expect more content to progressively trickle in with the upcoming releases. As usual, we will keep you posted on what to expect, once we know more.

Stay tuned!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Firefox Relay Website and Add-on

Both projects would be on a 4-week release cycle. New content will be added to Pontoon up to  about 7-10 days before the release. The last build to include localised content can be hours before the release.

Mozilla.org

Two more languages were migrated from Pontoon to the vendor supported platform: German and French. Mozilla staff would have access to edit the localized content when necessary. If you spot any errors or issues, feel free to report them by filing a bug, or an issue at the repository.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

  • The platform team is working on implementing the onboarding project design that has been pending for a few years now. You can now track the progress from this GitHub milestone. We can’t wait to see how it turns out!
  • If you want to get information about release updates sooner, you can now do so by subscribing to our weekly release scrum meeting that we host in Air Mozilla. You can even subscribe to the folder to get notifications whenever a new recording comes up.
  • Are you a sucker for data? This P2P dashboard made by JR might be a perfect playground for you to explore. We talked about that a bit more in our monthly blog post. So go check it out if you haven’t. We also share our monthly stats from across contribution areas in that regular blog post. You won’t miss that one out!
  • Are you a Knowledge Base contributors? Please make sure to fill out this survey before Jan 11, 2022. 
  • Recently, we teamed up with the Firefox Focus team to get the messaging out for people to update their app to the latest version. Thanks to everybody who helped out to localize the banner strings for Firefox Focus. There are also shutouts for you at the bottom!
  • A call for help to Indonesian contributors to help us prioritize localization for Firefox Focus due to Indonesia being one of the top countries with high usage and profile creation for Firefox Focus for Android.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

  • PSA: We have temporarily removed the ability to change contributor email addresses due to security concerns. We’ll keep you updated when the feature becomes available again.
  • Thanks to Mitch, re-applying existing filters has become much simpler and finally works as expected. If you filter e.g. Unreviewed strings, review some and then want to refresh the list, simply select the Unreviewed filter.
  • We have changed the display of pinned comments, which have been rendered twice in the past. Another great work by Mitch!
  • Finally, thanks to Pike and April for many under-the-hood improvements to our codebase. One of the more obvious ones happened in the Concordance search, which now features infinite scroll.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

  • Thanks to gregdan3 for completing the style guide first in Toki Pona before starting on a project.

Events

  • Join us on Support Mozilla or SUMO Sprint for Firefox 97 this week to help users with issues. Interested to learn more? Check out our event page here!

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).

Friends of the Lion

  • Thank you to 你我皆凡人, Marcelo G, Ihor H, and Michael Kohler who helped us to translate Firefox Focus banner on support.mozilla.org to invite people to update their app to the latest version. Because of them, we’re able to get a quick turnaround on most of our priority locales: de, en-US, en-GB, fr, id, pt-BR, and zh-CN. Thank you!

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

  • If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

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.

L10n Report: December 2021 Edition

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

No responses yet

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!

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

New content and projects

We’re reaching the end of 2021, so it’s a good time to think back on what we were able to accomplish thanks to the amazing support of our community.

We had over 1,400 active contributors — with more than one translation submitted — who translated almost half a million strings (483,329 as of December 13, if you’re curious). For Firefox alone, we had over 168 thousand translations added to Pontoon.

Firefox desktop – A year in numbers

In 2021 we shipped two major releases of Firefox (MR1, MR2). MR1 was especially heavy on content changes, as we organically reviewed all menus and settings to make them simpler and easier to understand. That project alone involved almost 1200 new strings between January and April. The community was simply amazing in tackling that huge project, with several locales managing to ship a fully localized product, despite some inevitable last minute changes.

You can take a trip down memory lane by looking at the archive of Firefox l10n newsletters, which was also started this year to support the MR1 release.

In terms of locale coverage, we were able to add a new locale to release, Scots (sco), while 3 more were added to Nightly builds: Santali (sat), Sardinian (sc), Tajik (tg).

2021 mobile

2021 was quite a year for mobile! We launched a Focus for iOS and Android refresh, and like Firefox desktop, went through two major releases for Firefox for iOS and Android. There were over 21k translations done over the year, just for Firefox for Android!

Some more numbers:

  • For Firefox for Android, 103 locales total shipped as part of MR1 and MR2.
  • For Firefox for iOS, 91 locales total shipped as part of MR1 and MR2.
  • Focus for Android launched its refresh with 100 locales, while Focus for iOS launched with 78 locales.

All these numbers are incredible and show the hard work localizers put into making all these products available globally. We want to thank you all for the dedication you have shown, it is very humbling to see.

2021 was also the year where we experimented with two small localization pilot events on Zoom. Given the success and interest in doing more online workshops, we hope to extend these in 2022. Stay tuned!

Once more, thank you all for having made 2021 a success for localization across products!

Web Projects in 2021

AMO

In 2021, nearly 130 million users visited the site from 250 countries, regions and language combinations. More than 60% were non-English users, with Simplified Chinese seeing the biggest increase year-over-year in users and sessions compared to last year.

Firefox Accounts

This year, the product continues code migration to Fluent, primarily focusing on the email features. The feature of the subscription platform has expanded to support products like VPN and Relay.

For the past month, the top five languages with successful registrations on Firefox Accounts are Dutch, Japanese, Korean, and Russian, and Simplified Chinese. We really appreciate the fast turnaround on new strings lately.

Firefox Relay

We were able to expand Firefox Relay into 18 languages, making privacy more accessible to more people, adding to the success of our Relay Premium release.

Before we started translations, the entire experience was in English. Today, around 50% of our website visitors have their browser set to a language other than English, with German being the highest non-English language (17%) and French next at 7%.

Mozilla.org

Mozilla.org receives over 1.5 Billion visits a year. According to our analytics, half of our visitors have their browser preference set to a non-English language. In 2021, the overall traffic share of non-English visitors increased by ~1%. Conversion rate for Firefox downloads for non-English users improved by 2.55% (!!). We improved our bounce rate among non-english visitors by 1%.

We were able to take our VPN product and product landing page from being an English-only product, to being available in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Ireland, and the Netherlands. This resulted in significant contributions to our VPN subscription goals for the year.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

Q4 was packed up with releases. In addition to the MR2 launch, we also supported the Relay Premium launch and Firefox Suggest. But not only releases, we’re currently helping with the deprecation plan for Firefox Lockwise too.

This quarter, we also started to build closer relationships with the mobile team by starting a release report newsletter specifically for mobile products. This will be something that we’ll continue to deliver on a regular basis on top of the existing Desktop report.

In terms of article localization, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese, continue to be the top locales based on page views. However, unlike the first top 3 locales, we’re struggling with Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Help is surely welcomed for those 2 locales.

2021 was full of changes and experimentation. We said goodbye to Madalina and Joni but also welcomed new folks like Fabi, Daryl, Joe and Abby. We’ve experimented with video, data classification for major releases, moved Play Store Support from the Reply Tool to Conversocial, experimented with content for @FirefoxSupport, and lots of other things.

In 2021, our platform gathered almost 350 millions page views (345,504,433 to be exact) per 12/16, with 57.7% of them being from non-English locales. This number reflects just how important the localization communities are for our support team. We can’t thank them enough for their relentless support to help Firefox users.

Next year, we’re anticipating to support more premium products as well as continue to grow our peer to peer support. Building closer relationships with various teams internally is also another thing we’re looking forward to in 2022.

And as always, you’re more than welcome to join our Matrix or our contributor forum to talk more about anything related to support!

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Improved Insights

We’ve added a “Time to review suggestions” chart to the locale insights tab. The previous “Age of unreviewed suggestions” chart is still available via the control underneath the chart.

Graphs for unreviewed suggestionsSeparately, we’ve made the review and translation activity charts available on a per-project basis, so the “Insights” tab now shows up when looking at a project by itself, as well as within a team.

Revealing Adjacent Strings

Thanks to some significant and patient work by Mitchell, results in the entity search panel now have a new expand-button, which reveals the strings immediately before and after the selected string in its source file. This should make it not only easier to navigate between related strings, but also may provide valuable context where it’s not otherwise available.

Example of UI for adjacent strings

Privacy and Security – Mozilla VPN Client, MAC add-on

This year we introduced a couple of new projects developed by the Privacy and Security team: Mozilla VPN Client, Firefox Multi-account Containers add-on.

Mozilla VPN Client was particularly important to show how the community can be an asset for Mozilla. Thanks to their amazing work, we were able to move from supporting 1 locale (American English) and 6 countries, to 28 locales and 15 countries. With the help of our volunteers, we can support locales that other commercial organizations will never care about, making products truly accessible.

The localized version of Firefox Multi-account Containers will be released in early 2022, but we already have about 30 locales ready to go.

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)

Friends of the Lion

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

  • If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

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.

Announcing top-voted features and an opportunity to vote on more

Matjaž Horvat

No responses yet

Last spring we ran a survey among active Pontoon users in order to get a clearer picture of how they use (or don’t use) notifications. One of the questions was which new notification features we should develop. The following three received the most votes from the 169 participants of the survey:

1. Link “new string” notifications to missing strings.
2. Send notifications about pending suggestions to reviewers.
3. Add ability to opt-out of specific notifications types.

Thanks to eemeli, the first item was resolved back in August. The second feature has also been implemented, which means that every Friday reviewers receive notifications about newly created unreviewed suggestions within the last week. And finally, you can now opt-out of notifications in your user settings. Note however that you’ll still be receiving notifications sent by project managers.

You can now opt-out of specific notification types in user settings.

Vote for new Pontoon features for H1 2022

We’ve now started working on Pontoon Roadmap for the first half of year 2022 and we’d like to commit to implement at least 3 features voted by Pontoon users.

Please let us know how important for you are the features listed below in a quick 5-minute survey:

  • Add a light theme (details).
  • Make keyboard shortcuts customizable per user (details).
  • Add virtual keyboard with special characters to the editor, customizable per locale (details).
  • Notify suggestion authors when their suggestions get reviewed (details).
  • Add “Copy translation from another locale as suggestion” batch action to simplify translation of similar locales (details).
  • Pre-fill editor with 100% Translation Memory matches when available (details).
  • Expose team managers on team dashboards to help users get in touch with them more easily (details).
  • Add a badge to new users’ avatars (details).
  • When new users make their first contribution, provide them with (team-specific) guidelines (details).
  • Link project names in Concordance search results to corresponding strings in translate view (details).

At the end of the survey you’ll be able to add your own ideas, which you are always welcome to submit on GitHub.

L10n Report: October Edition

Delphine

No responses yet

October 2021 Report

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 l10n-driver

Welcome eemeli, our new l10n-driver! He will be working on Fluent and Pontoon, and is part of our tech team along with Matjaž. We hope we can all connect soon so you can meet him.

New localizers

Katelem from Obolo locale. Welcome to localization at Mozilla!

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

New community/locales added

Obolo (ann) locale was added to Pontoon.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

A new major release (MR2) is coming for Firefox desktop with Firefox 94. The deadline to translate content for this version, currently in Beta, is October 24.

While MR2 is not as content heavy as MR1, there are changes to very visible parts of the UI, like the onboarding for both new and existing users. Make sure to check out the latest edition of the Firefox L10n Newsletter for more details, and instructions on how to test.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Focus for Android and iOS have gone through a new refresh! This was done as part of our ongoing MR2 work – which has also covered Firefox for Android and iOS. You can read about all of this here.

Many of you have been heavily involved in this work, and we thank you for making this MR2 launch across all mobile products such a successful release globally.

We are now starting our next iteration of MR2 releases. We are still currently working on scoping out the mobile work for l10n, so stay tuned.

One thing to note is that the l10n schedule dates for mobile should now be aligned across product operating systems: one l10n release cycle for all of android, and another release cycle for all of iOS. As always, Pontoon deadlines remain your source of truth for this.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Firefox Accounts

Firefox Accounts team has been working on transitioning Gettext to Fluent. They are in the middle of migrating server.po to auth.ftl, the component that handles the email feature. Unlike previous migrations where the localized strings were not part of the plan, this time, the team wanted to include them as much as possible. The initial attempt didn’t go as planned due to multiple technical issues. The new auth.ftl file made a brief appearance in Pontoon and is now disabled. They will give it a go after confirming that the identified issues were addressed and tested.

Legal docs

All the legal docs are translated by our vendor. Some of you have reported translation errors or they are out of sync with the English source. If you spot any issues, wrong terminology, typo, missing content, to name a few, you can file a bug. Generally we do not encourage localizers to provide translations because of the nature of the content. If they are minor changes, you can create a PR and ask for a peer review to confirm your change before the change can be merged. If the overall quality is bad, we will request the vendor to change the translators.

Please note, the locale support for legal docs varies from product to product. Starting this year, the number of supported locales also has decreased to under 20. Some of the previously localized docs are no longer updated. This might be the reason you see your language out of sync with the English source.

Mozilla.org

Five more mobile specific pages were added since our last report. If you need to prioritize them, please give higher priority to the Focus, Index and Compare pages.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

Lots of new stuff since our last update here in June. Here are some of the highlights:

  • We’re working on refreshing the onboarding experience in SUMO. The content preparation has mostly done in Q3 and the implementation is expected in this quarter before the end of the year.
  • Catch up on what’s new in our support platform by reading our release notes in Discourse. One highlight of the past quarter is that we integrated Zendesk form for Mozilla VPN into SUMO. We don’t have the capability to detect subscriber at the moment, so everyone can file a ticket now. But we’re hoping to add the capability for that in the future.
  • Firefox Focus joined our forces in Play Store support. Contributors should be able to reply to Google Play Store reviews for Firefox Focus from Conversocial now. We also create this guideline to help contributors compose a reply for Firefox Focus reviews.
  • We welcomed 2 new team members in Q3. Joe who is our Support Operation Manager is now taking care of the premium customer support experience. And Abby, the new Content Manager, is our team’s latest addition who will be working closely with Fabi and our KB contributors to improve our help content.

You’re always welcome to join our Matrix or the contributor forum to talk more about anything related to support!

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Submit your ideas and report bugs via GitHub

We have enabled GitHub Issues in the Pontoon repository and made it the new place for tracking bugs, enhancements and tasks for Pontoon development. At the same time, we have disabled the Pontoon Component in Bugzilla, and imported all open bugs into GitHub Issues. Old bugs are still accessible on their existing URLs. For reporting security vulnerabilities, we’ll use a newly created component in Bugzilla, which allows us to hide security problems from the public until they are resolved.

Using GitHub Issues will make it easier for the development team to resolve bugs via commit messages and put them on a Roadmap, which will also be moved to GitHub soon. We also hope GitHub Issues will make suggesting ideas and reporting issues easier for the users. Let us know if you run into any issues or have any questions!

More improvements to the notification system coming

As part of our H1 effort to better understand how notifications are being used, the following features have received most votes in a localizer survey:

  • Notifications for new strings should link to the group of strings added.
  • For translators and locale managers, get notifications when there are pending suggestions to review.
  • Add the ability to opt-out of specific notifications.

Thanks to eemeli, the first item was resolved back in August. The second feature has also been implemented, which means reviewers will receive weekly notifications about newly created unreviewed suggestions within the last week. Work on the last item – ability to opt-out of specific notification types – has started.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

We published two new posts in the Localization category on Discourse:

Events

  • Michal Stanke shared his experience as a volunteer in the open source community at the annual International Translation Day event hosted by WordPress! Way to go!
  • 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?

  • If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

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.

L10n Report: August 2021 Edition

Peiying Mo

No responses yet

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!

New community/locales added

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

In terms of new content, it’s been a pretty calm period for Firefox after the MR1 release, with less than 50 strings added over the last 6 weeks. We expect that to change in the coming weeks, starting with a few clean-ups that didn’t land in time for MR1, and brand new features.

These are the relevant deadlines for the next month:

  • Firefox 91 shipped last Tuesday (August 10), and we welcomed a new locale with it: Scots.
  • The deadline to localize Firefox 92 is August 29 (release will happen on September 7), while Firefox 93 just started its life cycle in Nightly.

A reminder that Firefox 91 is also the new ESR, and will be supported for about 1 year. We plan to update localizations for 91 ESR in a few weeks, to improve coverage and pick up some bug fixes.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

We have exciting news coming up on the mobile front. In case you haven’t heard yet, we just brought back Focus for iOS and Focus for Android to Pontoon for localization. We are eager to bring back these products to a global audience with updated translations!

Both Focus for Android and Focus for iOS should have all strings in by August 17th. L10n deadline for both localizing and testing your work is September 6th. One difference you will notice is that iOS strings will be trickling in regularly – vs what we usually do for Firefox for iOS where you get all strings in one bulk.

Concerning Firefox for Android and Firefox for iOS: both projects are going to start landing strings for the next release, which promises to be a very interesting one. More info to come soon, please stay tuned on Matrix and Discourse for this!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

mozilla.org

A set of VPN pages were landed recently.  As the Mozilla VPN product expands to more markets, it would be great to get these pages localized. Do plan to take some time and work as a team to complete 4000+ words of new content. The pages contain some basic information on what distinguishes Mozilla’s VPN from others on the market. You will find it useful to spread the words and promote the product in your language.

There will be a couple of new projects on the horizon. Announcements will be made through  Discourse and Matrix.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

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)

Opportunities

International Translation Day

Call for community translator or manager as a panelist to represent the Mozilla l10n community:

As part of Translation Day 2021, the WordPress Polyglots team is organizing a handful of global events (in English) from Sept. 17 – 30, 2021. The planning team is still deciding on the format and dates for these events, but they will be virtual/online and accessible to anyone who’s interested. One of the events the team is putting together is a panel discussion between contributors from multiple open source or community-led translation projects. If you or anyone in your community would be interested in talking about your experience as a community translator and how translations work in your community or project, you would be a great fit!

Check out what the organizer and the communities were able to accomplish last year and what they are planning for this year. The panel discussion would involve localization contributors like you from other open source communities, sharing their experiences on the tools, process and creative ways to collaborate during the pandemic. We hope some of you can take the opportunity to share and learn.

Even if you are not able to participate in the event, maybe you can organize a virtual meeting within the community, meet and greet and celebrate this special day together.

Friends of the Lion

  • Congratulations to Temitope Olajide from the Yoruba l10n community, for your excellent job completing the Terminology project! Image by Elio Qoshi

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

  • If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

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.

Better Understanding Pontoon Notifications to Improve Them

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

No responses yet

As l10n-drivers, we strongly believe that notifications are an important tool to help localizers organize, improve, and prioritize their work in Pontoon. In order to make them more effective, and focus our development work, we first needed to better understand how localizers use them (or don’t).

In the second quarter of 2021, we ran a couple of experiments and a survey to get a clearer picture of the current status, and this blog post describes in detail the results of this work.

Experiments

First of all, we needed a baseline to understand if the experiments were making significant changes. Unfortunately, this data is quite hard to measure, since there are a lot of factors at play:

  • Localizers are more active close to deadlines or large releases, and those happen randomly.
  • The number of notifications sent heavily depends on new content showing up in the active projects (31), and that has unpredictable spikes over time.

With that in mind, we decided to repeat the same process every month:

  • Look at the notifications sent in the first 2 weeks of the month (“observation period”, starting with a Monday, and ending with a Monday two weeks later).
  • After 2 additional weeks, measure data about notifications (sent, read), recipients, how many of the recipients read at least 1 notification, and how many users were logged in (over the whole 4 weeks).
  BASELINE EXPERIMENT 1 EXPERIMENT 2
Observation period April 5-19 May 3-17 May 31 – June 14
Data collected on May 3 May 31 June 28
Sent 27043 12593 15383
Read 3172 1571 2198
Recipients 3072 2858 3370
Read 1+ 140 (4.56%) 125 (4.37%) 202 (5.99%)
Users logged in 517 459 446

Experiment 1

For the 1st experiment, we decided to promote the Pontoon Add-on. This add-on, among other things, allows users to read Pontoon notifications directly in the browser (even if Pontoon is not currently open), and receive a system notification when there are new messages to read.

Pontoon Add-on PromotionPontoon would detect if the add-on is already installed. If not, it would display an infobar suggesting to install the add-on. Users could also choose to dismiss the notification: while we didn’t track how many saw the banner, we know that 393 dismissed it over the entire quarter.

Unfortunately, this experiment didn’t seem to have an immediate positive impact on the number of users reading notifications (it actually decreased slightly). On the other hand, the number of active users of the add-on has been slowly but steadily increasing, so we hope that will have an impact in the long term.

Pontoon Add-on Statistics over last 90 daysThanks to Michal Stanke for creating the add-on in the first place, and helping us implement the necessary changes to make the infobar work in Pontoon. In the process, we also made this an “official” add-on on AMO, undergoing a review for each release.

Experiment 2

For the 2nd experiment, we made a slight change to the notifications icon within Pontoon, given that we always suspected that the existing one was not very intuitive. The original bell icon would change color from gray to red when new notifications are available, the new one would display the number of unread notifications as a badge over the icon — a popular UX pattern.

Pontoon NotificationThis seemed to have a positive impact on the number of users reading notifications, as the ratio of recipients reading notifications has increased by over 30%. Note that it’s hard to isolate the results of this experiment from the other work raising awareness around notifications (first experiment, blog posts, outreach, or even the survey).

Survey

Between May 26 and June 20, we ran a survey targeting users who were active in Pontoon within the last 2 years. In this context, “active” means that they submitted at least one translation over that period.

We received 169 complete responses, and these are the most significant points (you can find the complete results here).

On a positive note, the spread of the participants’ experience was surprisingly even: 34.3% have been on Pontoon for less than a year, 33.1% between 1 and 4 years, 32.5% for more than 4 years.

7% of participants claim that they don’t know what their role is in Pontoon. That’s significant, even more so if we account for participants who might have picked “translator” while they’re actually contributors (I translate, therefore I’m a translator). Clearly, we need to do some work to onboard new users and help them understand how roles work in Pontoon, or what’s the lifecycle of a suggestion.

53% of people don’t check Pontoon notifications. More importantly, almost 63% of these users — about 33% of all participants — didn’t know Pontoon had them in the first place! 19% feel like they don’t need notifications, which is not totally surprising: volunteers contribute when they can, not necessarily when there’s work to do. Here lies a significant problem though: notifications are used for more than just telling localizers “this project has new content to localize”. For example, we use notifications for commenting on specific errors in translations, to provide more background on a specific string or a project.

As for areas where to focus development, while most features were considered between 3 and 5 on a 1-5 importance scale, the highest rated items were:

  • Notifications for new strings should link to the group of strings added.
  • For translators and locale managers, get notifications when there are pending suggestions to review.
  • Add the ability to opt-out of specific notifications.

What’s next?

First of all, thanks to all the localizers who took the time to answer the survey, as this data really helps us. We’ll need to run it again in the future, after we do more changes, in particular to understand how the data evolves around notifications discoverability and awareness.

As an immediate change, given the results of experiment 2, we plan to keep the updated notification icon as the new default.

L10n Report: June 2021 Edition

Francesco Lodolo [:flod]

No responses yet

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!

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

New content and projects

Firefox 89 (MR1)

On June 1st, Mozilla released Firefox 89. That was a major milestone for Firefox, and a lot of work went into this release (internally called MR1, which stands for Major Release 1). If this new update was well received — see for example this recent article from ZDNet — it’s also thanks to the amazing work done by our localization community.

For the first time in over a decade, we looked at Firefox holistically, making changes across the board to improve messages, establish a more consistent tone, and modernize some dialogs. This inevitably generated a lot of new content to localize.

Between November 2020 and May 2021, we added 1637 strings (6798 words). To get a point of reference, that’s almost 14% of the entire browser. What’s amazing is that the completion levels didn’t fall drastically:

  • Nov 30, 2020: 89.03% translated across all shipping locales, 99.24% for the top 15 locales.
  • May 24, 2021: 87.85% translated across all shipping locales, 99.39% for the top 15 locales.

The completion level across all locales is lower, but that’s mostly due to locales that are completely unmaintained, and that we’ll likely need to drop from release later this year. If we exclude those 7 locales, overall completion increased by 0.10% (to 89.84%).

Once again, thanks to all the volunteers who contributed to this successful release of Firefox.

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

These are the important deadlines for Firefox 90, currently in Beta:

  • Firefox 90 will be released on July 13. It will be possible to update localizations until July 4.
  • Firefox 91 will move to beta on July 12 and will be released on August 10.

Keep in mind that Firefox 91 is also going to be the next ESR version. Once that moves to release, it won’t generally be possible to update translations for that specific version.

Talking about Firefox 91, we’re planning to add a new locale: Scots. Congratulations to the team for making it so quickly to release!

On a final note, expect to see more updates to the Firefox L10n Newsletter, since this has proved to be an important tool to provide more context to localizers, and help them with testing.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Next l10n deadlines for mobile projects:

  • Firefox for Android v91: July 12
  • Firefox for iOS v34.1: June 9

Once more, we want to thank all the localizers who worked hard for the MR1 (Proton) mobile release. We really appreciate the time and effort spent on helping ensure all these products are available globally (and of course, also on desktop). THANK YOU!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

AMO

There are a few strings exposed to Pontoon that do not require translation. Only Mozilla staff in the admin role to the product would be able to see them. The developer for the feature will add a comment of “no need to translate” or context to the string at a later time. We don’t know when this will be added. For the time being, please ignore them. Most of the strings with a source string ID of src/olympia/scanners/templates/admin/* can be ignored. However, there are still a handful of strings that fall out of the category.

MDN

The project continues to be on hold in Pontoon. The product repository doesn’t pick up any changes made in Pontoon, so fr, ja, zh-CN, and zh-TW are now read-only for now.  The MDN site, however, is still maintaining the articles localized in these languages plus ko, pt-BR, and ru.

Mozilla.org

The websites in ar, hi-IN, id, ja, and ms languages are now fully localized through vendor service since our last report. Communities of these languages are encouraged to help promote the sites through various social media platforms to  increase download, conversion and create new profiles.

What’s new or coming up in SuMo

Lots of exciting things happening in SUMO in Q2. Here’s a recap of what’s happening:

  • You can now subscribe to Firefox Daily Digest to get updates about what people are saying about Firefox and other Mozilla products on social media like Reddit and Twitter.
  • We now have release notes for Kitsune in Discourse. The latest one was about advanced search syntax which is a replacement for the former Advanced Search feature.
  • We are trying something new for Firefox 89 by collecting MR1 (Major Release 1) specific feedback from across channels (support forum, Twitter, and Reddit). You can look into how we’re doing it on the contributor thread and learn more about MR1 changes from a list that we put together on this spreadsheet.

As always, feel free to join SUMO Matrix room to discuss or just say hi to the rest of the community.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

Since May, we’ve been running experiments in Pontoon to increase the number of users reading notifications. For example, as part of this campaign, you might have seen a banner encouraging you to install the Pontoon Add-on — which you really should do — or noticed a slightly different notification icon in the top right corner of the window.

Pontoon NotificationRecently, we also sent an email to all Pontoon accounts active in the past 2 years, with a link to a survey specifically about further improving notifications. If you haven’t completed the survey yet, or haven’t received the email, you can still take the survey here (until June 20th).

Look out for pilcrows

When a source string includes line breaks, Pontoon will show a pilcrow character (¶) where the line break happens.

This is how the Fluent file looks like:

onboarding-multistage-theme-tooltip-automatic-2 =
    .title =
        Inherit the appearance of your operating
        system for buttons, menus, and windows.

While in most cases the line break is not relevant — it’s just used to make the source file more readable — double check the resource comment: if the line break is relevant, it will be pointed out explicitly.

If they’re not relevant, you can just put your translation on one line.

If you want to preserve the line breaks in your translation, you have a few options:

  • Use SHIFT+ENTER to create a new line while translating.
  • Click the ¶ character in the source: that will create a new line in the position where your cursor currently sits.
  • Use the COPY button to copy the source, then edit it. That’s not really efficient, as your locale might need a line break in a different place.

Do not select the text with your mouse, and copy it in the translation field. That will copy the literal character in the translation, and it will be displayed in the final product, causing bugs.

If you see the ¶ character in the translation field (see red arrow in the image below), it will also appear in the product you are translating, which is most likely not what you want. On the other hand, it’s expected to see the ¶ character in the list of translations under the translation field (green arrow), as it is in the source string and the string list.

Events

  • We have held our first Localization Workshop Zoom event on Saturday June 5th. Next iterations will happen on Friday June 11th and Saturday June 12th. We have invited active managers and translators from a subset of locales. If this experience turns out to be useful, we will consider opening up to an even larger audience with expanded locales.
  • 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)

Friends of the Lion

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

  • If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:

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.