Greetings, SUMO Nation!
It is with great pleasure that I invite you to read Goofy’s account of how the French l10ns tackled the SUMO KB… and won :-) Goofy has been a long-standing contributor to all things Mozilla, and I am honoured to have Imen (more about her below) and him leading the charge to make SUMO useful for French-speaking users! Now, let me pass the keyboard to Monsieur Goofy himself…
Sprint Time in Paris
Sumo #3 French Localization Sprint @Mozilla Paris
The French volunteer translators team for SUMO have recently participated in a very successful localization session taking place at the Paris MozSpace between Friday 24th and Sunday 26th of April.
For the third time, we have organized a special localization meetup with the French-speaking Mozilla community. We call it “Locasprint” and it is one good occasion every 6 months or so to meet all volunteer contributors in person, work and have fun together (you can read the French blogpost for more details). Along with various tasks such as tech documentation translation for MDN, pages and snippets for mozilla.org, SUMO translation was a major goal for that weekend.
Our initial target when we planned the meetup was to reach 85% of the pages translated and duly reviewed, but as it happened, we are proud to announce that we have reached 100% done for all products! Here is the screenshot telling what was achieved, note that even strings from the interface were duly completed by our excellent Belgian Mozillian Benoit.
Of course this success is the result of the efforts of the whole team during more than a year, but this last hop was great.
I must confess that I was not sure 100% was necessary, since the very last articles had a low view rate, but the thrill of being together and enjoy the IRL meeting brought some magic. Well, not really magic after all: the incredible dedication and enthusiasm of Imen Rahal, my co-locale leader who came from Algiers for the occasion, made the very difference.
Her profile on Sumo tells much about how involved she is.
It is also time to congratulate our great contributors such as Yves, who beside translation itself has done a great task on quality checking, and who has accepted to join our little reviewer team.
And I am especially glad to welcome Thomas, a new volunteer contributor, who translated during the sprint 18 previously untranslated pages!
What’s next?
Our efforts on Sumo are not over, because we still have to:
- Add more screenshots with French-speaking interface messages – they are missing here and there!
- Check and improve the quality of articles; it sometimes involves choosing different phrasing from the original, so that the French-speaking user is comfortable reading them.
- Translate new and coming soon articles about Firefox for iOS, screen sharing, Hello features…
and finally…
- Keep an eye on the updates that are sometimes rushed onto our “todo” list!
You can do it (and more)!
SUMO Localizers from all over the world – you can unlock the same achievement. A few tips from our experience:
- First – build a team, a core of one is enough to begin with. Then, grow bigger and accept all contributions, even the modest and occasional ones. Be friendly and welcome new volunteers, even though they don’t immediately perform a perfect job. They will learn step by step, just like you did.
- Fix realistic and increasing targets that can be reached with the team you have – such as 20, 50, 100 top articles.
- Maintain the group efforts in the long run. It is pretty difficult sometimes, especially when update alerts are rushing into your inbox… but it’s not impossible!
- Organize regular meetups to boost efforts and progression! Mozilla will help you through the Reps Program, just ask and see what is possible.
- Ask for help whenever you need it, the SUMO team is there to help you reach the next goal :-)
(Thank you for this amazing achievement and a collection of great memories that can definitely inspire others, Goofy!)
(Also, chapeau bas to all the participants who make SUMO a reality in French – you are our linguistic ambassadors out there, and we couldn’t do it without you :-))