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Categories: Localization

SUMO l10n update

Hello, Localizers of SUMO!

sumo_l10nFirst of all, thanks to all of you for taking the time to update the Knowledge Base in your locales in the last 3 months. I hope the next 3 months will be as awesome as the start – you make it happen!

Now, to share a few updates with you.

Kitsune

As you may remember, we are currently in partial development freeze, due to changes in team structure. Still, our awesome community (this means YOU!), supported by our relentless pull request herders, keeps tinkering with the platform and improving it, bit by bit. Thank you!

Thanks to Michal, Safwan, Mike, and others (both reporting and investigating issues), the l10n backlog is now shorter than ever! By the way, if you notice that an l10n bug is missing from it, please let me know or add it yourself.

I have also gathered feedback from some of our most active localizers, in order to see what could potentially be improved or experimented with to make using Kitsune for localization easier. Some of the findings are as follow:

  • The UI on the translation page for an article is too cluttered for some of you.
    •  I will experiment with content blocking add-ons to see how the page would look and function without certain components
  • The articles in the localization dashboard are not always ordered in the most useful way (currently, only by traffic to their en-US versions).
    •  A quick (and partial) solution to this is using the Notification system to highlight the content that should be focused on (for example for launches).
    • Another option would be adding the ability to “pin” or “sticky” certain articles on top of the dashboard – this would require some developer work and may not be easy.
  • Some of you prefer to use automated translation tools to get a version of the article that they later improve.
    • This, among other pieces of feedback received during my investigation in the last few months, suggests that the translation page could use a few tooltips with suggestions for best practices in the community for different stages of translating an article. I will explore options of adding these to the translation page, together with figuring out what content they would include (for example, suggestions of automated translation tools that could help you get started with an article).

Pontoon

Learn more about what’s happened with Pontoon in the last three months from this blog post by Matjaz, its lead developer.

The highlights include:

  • Progressive string loading – faster loading times for projects with a lot of strings (this includes SUMO).
  • You can load, search, and filter strings across an entire project – very handy!
  • Translators can Approve All, Delete All, and use Find & Replace in selected strings – even handier!

What’s more, all users of Pontoon are invited to develop the roadmap for the tool by filing new feature requests and commenting on existing ones. You can find more details about this in the blog post linked above.

… and if you’re curious about Pontoon, but haven’t started using it yet, take a look at this quick introductory video:

 

Best Practices

The L10n team has invested time and effort over the last three months into processes, tools, and resources to help everyone involved in l10n at Mozilla improve the overall quality. You can learn more about these efforts from this blog post.

The great news is that now it’s much easier to improve existing localizations in Transvision, one of the core l10n tools at Mozilla. To do so:

  1. Visit the new Unlocalized Words view.
  2. Decide which terms should remain untranslated and add them to a term list for your locale.
  3. Fix (= translate) the terms that should be translated.
  4. Look at your locale’s list of inconsistent translations in the new Translation Consistency view.
  5. Decide which translations there are correct for each context in which they appear.
  6. Fix (= re-translate) those translations that need to be consistent.

Finally, get together with your l10n community (offline or online) and try creating a draft of your locale’s style guide, using the existing template. If you think the instructions are too long, too short, too full of jargon, or require too much effort, send feedback to the L10n team that sets global l10n standards and best practices for Mozilla projects.

Community

Remember about the upcoming L10n hackathons for your locale! Try to make the most of the upcoming opportunity to connect with your fellow localizers!