Hey there, SUMO Nation! We’re back to sharing more awesomeness from you, by you, for all the users. This time I have the pleasure of passing the screen over to Michal, our Czech locale leader. Michal and his trusted team of Czech l10ns reached all the possible KB milestones ever and are maintaining the Czech KB with grace and ease. Learn how they did it and get inspired!
The years 2015 and 2016 were a great success for our Czech localization team. We have grown in number, improved our suggestion & reviewing workflow, moved all projects to a single place (Pontoon) and finished all milestones for SUMO l10n – both for UI and articles. But there is much more that we gained when making all dashboards green than just “getting the work done”.
But who is the Czech team?
That’s a very good question. The Czech team has not been involved much in the global SUMO life. So, if you do not know us, let me introduce everyone.
- First there is me ;) – Michal. I primarily focus on product localization, but “as a hobby” I am trying to help the SUMO heroes too.
- Our biggest hero and record breaker Jiří! If you open any Czech article, he worked on it directly, or reviewed and polished it to perfection. His counter recently exceeded the number of 730 articles updated.
- Miroslav is our long-time contributor and his updates and translations are considered approved in advance.
- Tomáš does irreplaceable work keeping Kitsune UI localization in great shape, and he started that in the old ages of Verbatim.
- I almost forgot our former leader Pavel. Many thanks to him for the outstanding work on both Kitsune UI l10n and the very first help articles as well.
- I also want to highlight the contributions of other brave volunteers. Their updates and translation even a few articles helped us conquer our dashboard.
Nice to meet all of you, guys.
Thank you, SUMO! So, the story… At the end of last year, Michał looked closely on the locale statuses and assigned the milestones we should smash this year. Our milestone was to localize all articles globally. That was something I didn’t believe we can do easily. Even in February or March a new set of milestones appeared and the updated one for Czech reduced the “requirement” to localize 700 articles. Well, from that point in time, we cheated a little. ;)
As you may notice only 697 articles now. During the localization we noticed some articles were pretty outdated, containing links to pages that no longer exist, etc. So we’ve got in touch with the team, reported them and… they were magically archived. But do not think we are just bloody cheaters achieving milestones through asking for content deletion. No, we made almost 400 updates to all articles this year (50% of the total we’ve done in the whole 2015)!
The cooperation between us (localizers) and the SUMO team (Michał, Joni, Madalina, and others), I personally have found very beneficial. One one side, they put a huge effort in our support, introducing a new tool or explaining article content, as well as Firefox release notes and news. During the localization we read each article whole at least once or twice, so giving them feedback or suggesting updates is the smallest thing we can offer from our side.
Amazing! But you mentioned you learned something new too?
True. We learned that communication is very important. In the team, we learned to share new ideas on terminology and also opened a discussion on the theme of screenshots, which are our next target. Did you notice, there is no dedicated way to mark that your localization revision is missing localized screenshots? Oh, it’s quite simple in fact. We are adding a “[scr]” tag into the revision comment each time we have not had enough time to take localized screenshots, and only translated the article content. It’s very easy to filter them out in the “Recent revisions” list, once you have time and mood for some “screenshotting”.
Equally important is the communication outside the localization team. A lot of strings in the Kitsune UI would have been translated blindly without any consultation. Especially in the support forum areas, we haven’t been using those pages ourselves until the beginning of April (yes, we did forum support, too!).
In the light of our success, we do not want to rest on the laurels. It’s time to look forward – our screenshots are not perfect, and we are still dividing our efforts between articles and the Kitsune UI. I hope that Kitsune can support us in both areas a little more, e.g. there are no tools for finding the actual location of the strings, but that’s something we can help fix. We are actually quite new to Kitsune. But as it’s great to help people by bringing knowledge into your language, it’s also quite important to start a discussion, even if we might think the questions we have are trivial. Just do not be afraid to say what you think is important for the project.