Categories: Announcements

SUMO — now with l10n!

support.mozilla.com now better supports localization. There is still work to be done, but we’ve made a number of important accomplishments this week that are worth mentioning:

  • Automatic language detection based on browser’s accept-lang setting. Right now it’s hard to see this in action without an account, because there are no live translations of articles yet. However, if you log in, you can go to e.g. this article. The page should then display in your primary language as specified in your browser. If the page still comes up in English when it shouldn’t, go to your user account preferences and set the language to “Site default” (which is the default for new accounts from now on).
  • The locale can be hard-coded in the URL with e.g. http://support.mozilla.com/fr/kb/prefs-en-US. Note that the article name in this example gives the impression of including locale info (“prefs-en-US”), but that’s just coincidental because we haven’t renamed it to the real name yet (because we might still need to import more locales for in-product help). The locale in this case is fr.
  • picture-4.pngIf you try to visit a page that is not yet translated to the language you specify, e.g. http://support.mozilla.com/fr/kb/Profiles, a notification will show up at the top of the article, informing you that the page is not yet translated.
  • When a content writer makes a correction or significant change in an article that should also be updated in other translations of the article, the content writer can tick a checkbox saying “This is an significant edit of this article that should mark other translations as outdated.” By checking it, other translations of the article will automatically be marked as “potentially outdated.” Again, this is hard to try out today because we don’t have any live content that is translated. Feel free to take a stab at that! :)
  • With the feature above, a localizer/translator can then easily see what was changed and update his/her translated copy based on a colorized diff. Of course, anyone can sign up and update a translation.
  • Speaking of colorized diffs, that is also fixed now. If you don’t see it, please reload the browser to refresh your cache.

Note that we’re still working on making the whole UI localized, including strings like “Table Of Contents,” and we’ll get to it shortly.

A big thank you to Nelson Ko who has worked really hard to implement many of these changes over the weeks. Thanks also to Jason for the patch for colorized diffs, and to everyone else for testing and submitting feedback!

3 comments on “SUMO — now with l10n!”

  1. funTomas wrote on

    Well, Chriss Illias locked the page every potential translator will encounter first: http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Contributor+Home+Page
    Can you ping me when unlocked, pls.

  2. Omnisilver wrote on

    Hello, i write some french documentation and i’m interested in SUMO, but : why don’t you have firefox in the URL ? For http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Profiles there is nothing in the URL who let know that the article only deals with Firefox … within reading it.

    And i guess that thunderbird support will be added later, how will you do then ? Create a /thunderbird, for example http://support.mozilla.com/thunderbird/kb/Profiles ?

    It would be better to move Firefox doc to http://support.mozilla.com/firefox/ and be able to add thunderbird, seamonkey later, on the same «level». The home page would be a selection of the software we need help (a big firefox, a big thunderbird, and a big seamonkey for example).

    What do you think about it ?

  3. Chris Ilias wrote on

    Omnisilver: support.mozilla.com is only for Firefox support. As I understand it, Thunderbird is eventually going to have its own site (with support section), and SeaMonkey already has seamonkey-project.org.
    To read more about the Thunderbird issue, there have been past discussions in mozilla.support.planning.

    Incidentally, your idea for the home page is the current plan for the mozilla.org support page. :-)