For the upcoming release of Firefox 3.0.5, we will be moving 5 languages out of beta into official translations of Firefox.  These include the following locales:

• bn-IN, Bengali
• eo, Esperanto
• gl, Galician
• hi-IN, Hindi
• lv, Latvian

It’s fair then to ask just what we do to assess whether a language is ready to be moved out of beta and into official status.  When we release a new language, we place them in beta so users of this new translation know that it is a new version and might contain errors.  Over the course of the next few months and leading up to the next Firefox update, we encourage our localizers to test their versions and provide feedback to us so we can assess whether or not to move the langauge out of beta. I typically ask localizers to answer the following questions:

1. Has the localizer been able to ‘advertise’ the localization so others know they are available for testing during the beta period?
2. Has there been any press or blogging activity to generate visibility?  Can Mozilla help on this?
3. Has the localizer gathered feedback from end-users?  Is the feedback positive and do end-users believe that the release is ready to become ‘final’?
4. Does the localizer have access to systems or volunteers to help with testing coverage of builds on all three platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux)?
5. Are there any outstanding blocker bugs (or other bugs) that the localizer or community has filed that need to be resolved before moving out of beta?  If so, what are the bugs and known issues?
6. Has the localizer been able run, or have plans to run, any specific or targeted tests to check things like:

• General “smoke tests” to check the operation of the build to make sure all parts of the UI are working as expected?  Mozilla has Litmus (http://quality.mozilla.org/node/71) and this is a good time to create a test group and create tests for each locale.
• Dialog sizing checks?
• Spell or grammar checking tests the correctness and accuracy of the translation?

Once the localization teams have provided responses to these questions, we can together assess whether or not they are ready for final version. To help with QA and testing, we are presently conducting a study with our localizers to learn where the community needs support and where/how they are doing testing. We will publish results by the end of this quarter.

Have you taken the Mozilla QA/Testing survey?  If you are a Mozilla localizer, please take it.  Follow this link to the survey.

You may remember that Mozilla made a grant to the team at Translate.org.za this past summer to help improve the translation tools that many of our localizers use to localize Firefox.  One of the stipulations of that grant asked Translate to provide a mid-year report summarizing their progress.  Many thanks to Friedel (the lead developer at the Translate Toolkit) who submitted it to me today.

Highlights include the following:

• Integrating with Mozilla’s code repository system, Mercurial
• Launching their offline editor Virtaal, which will allow localizers to work on translations when they are unable to access the Web
• Merging Verbatim work by clouserw and dschafer into their trunk.  (Wil wrote a very thoughtful piece about the decisions Wil and Mozilla made before choosing to hack on Pootle and how it has gone since then.)
• Migrating to Django, a new web platform for Pootle that should make developer contributions in the future a bit easier

We hope to have two projects integrated into Verbatim by the end of this quarter so localizers can use the tool to translate the UI for both AMO (addons.mozilla.org) and SUMO (support.mozilla.com).  This will happen due to the great work by Wil Clouser and the guys at Translate Toolkit.

Amidst all that is going on in our day-to-day related to Mozilla localization, one of the most important things we can do is to think about the future.  It’s about this time each quarter that I start to think about the goals for next quarter.  What can we do better and where should we focus?  Stepping away to do that can be challenging when so much is going on.  My hope is that the l10n community will create its goals together for the next quarter.  We’ll start that ambitious exercise soon…

…even more ambitious is the undertaking of Mozilla’s chief lizard wrangler.   You may have seen Mitchell’s post about the 2010 goal setting process.  Mozilla is really trying to push the envelope when it comes to inclusiveness and distributed authority.  And, we want everyone in the l10n community to have a chance to provide his or her input on the vision of Mozilla for 2010.  When you think of the localization community in the future, what do you envision?

Mitchell lists the following Mozilla-wide goals:

1. Deepen Mozilla’s role as a centerpiece of the Internet

• communities continue to expand and provide means for individual development
• thought leadership expands to include things such as the open web, hybrid social enterprises, organizational sustainability, shared decision-making, individual control, and portability in Internet life
• innovations emerge from the Mozilla world
• technology excellence and industry wide leadership continues
• projects and products remain vital

2. Data:  provide leadership in

• helping people exercise better ownership and control over their data
• making anonymous, aggregate “usage data” more of a public resource

3. Mobile

• have an effective product in the mobile market
• demonstrate that “mobile” is part of one, unified, open web

4. Continue Firefox mindshare and marketshare momentum

What are your thoughts?  As you read these, what do you think as they relate to what you are doing inside l10n?  How would you change these goals?  What do you like?

Please comment on this post.  I will respond to everyone’s comments, so this is not a one-way post and response.  Let’s disuss it here.  Any thoughts?  Don’t hold back, let’s hear what you have to say. 

54.

(It was 52…we got two late additions.)

That’s a big number.

Incredible thanks to all the localizers who participated.  The teams are listed below where you’ll find a cut-and-paste of the patch that updates the shipped-locales bug filed by Axel.  If you’re unfamiliar with the notation below, the “+” signs are locales we added from last time.  The “-” are locales who didn’t make it.  (See all of you in by RC1! )  You can tell the localizations by the locale codes: in some case it is two letters (ab) and in others it is four letters separated by a hyphen (ab-CD).

diff --git a/browser/locales/shipped-locales b/browser/locales/shipped-locales
--- a/browser/locales/shipped-locales
+++ b/browser/locales/shipped-locales
@@ -1,27 +1,39 @@
+af
+ar
 be
+bg
+bn-IN
 ca
 cs
+cy
 de
+el
+en-GB
 en-US
-eo
 es-AR
 es-ES
+et
 eu
 fi
 fr
 fy-NL
 ga-IE
+gu-IN
 he
 hi-IN
 hu
 id
+is
 it
 ja linux win32
 ja-JP-mac osx
+ka
+kn
 ko
 lt
+lv
+mr
 nb-NO
-nl
 nn-NO
 pa-IN
 pl
@@ -31,7 +43,11 @@
 ru
 si
 sk
+sl
+sq
 sv-SE
+te
+tr
 uk
 zh-CN
 zh-TW

By clicking on this link, you’ll see the newly created download page for Firefox in Afrikaans.

This is an example of how the l10n-drivers team is trying hard to listen to our l10n community, and trying even harder to act upon the suggestions.  We gathered feedback from a lot of locale leaders who thought we should experiment by creating individual download pages for locales who did not have a localized site featuring their version of Firefox.  This idea was only validated when Chofmann traveled to Argentina and heard from some that 70% of Argentinians are using the es-ES (Spain) version of Firefox because search results pointed users to the Mozilla Europe es-ES page.

So, we joined up with marketing and web-dev to take on the experiment and made it a quarterly goal for the localization team.  We started by researching which locales lacked a download page.  Several of the European locales have such a page due to the great work in the past by our localizers and Mozilla Europe.  But, for those who didn’t, we took on the effort to create ones.  We should have as many as 40 new sites pointing to localizations by the end of this month.  Special thanks to Pascalc, Laura Mesa, John Slater, Clouserw, and Oremj who did all this, and to the localizers who translated their pages.  Let’s see how it impacts downloads.

This past week, Staś sent out some reminder emails to our localizers that the code freeze for FF 3.1 Beta 2 was Sunday at 11:59 PM Mountain View time.  Our Georgian localizer Gia Shervashidze wrote back,

“Hi Staś, Great, thanks, sorry - there was/is really mad times in Georgia.  Well… i translate all missing strings for FF31 and start working with HG.  So… i would like to start from “blank list” - to upload whole folders (browser, dom, netwerk, toolkit)?  Is it possible at all? (file attached - f31.zip) same is true for Calendar, Thunderbird and Seamonkey (suite).  Best, g.\” [sic]

Staś forwarded me the email and quickly we were reminded that there has been quite a struggle in Georgia over the past few months.   Staś and I chatted on IRC about how amazing it was that Gia was going to make the deadline.  And, it struck us both once again how much our localizers care about and do for Mozilla.  Frankly, it stuns me, keeping me humble and focused.

I emailed Gia, writing, “Hey…if you don’t make the second beta, we understand.  Please be well and let us know how we can help.”  I asked Gia if I could blog about him, relaying that he is striving hard to localize Firefox 3.1 for the second beta, though his country has been battered recently by war.  I mentioned that I thought it was a bit inspiring.

Gia quickly responded, saying that things weren’t so bad, and that he was more focused on getting FF 3.1 ready. He also asked me to mention some other things he is working on in Georgia right now, not dwelling on anything, but the work.  Sure thing, Gia!  Here’s a bit more of what he is doing:

“As the ICT person of the just founded “St. Andrew Georgian University” (http://www.sangu.ge - Georgian only)  i’m going to prepare educational DVD with Georgian portable versions of Mozilla products and “derivatives” (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, KompoZer, Songbird, possibly Seamonkey), Oxygen OpenOffice (UI - 100%, Help - partially), GCompris, TuxPaint, Stellarium, plenty of other soft, Georgian Unicode fonts, etc. (all of them are my contribution also) and [try to] freely distribute it in Georgia.  i’ll give You to know as soon as it will be ready (not later than couple of weeks i hope - just waiting final versions of some soft) and yes, You can blog anything [about] without consent (just let me know if).  There is a pleasure for me to participate in localization efforts for Mozilla. Great soft, great people.”  [sic]

That’s amazing.

Truly a pleasure working with you, Gia.  Thanks for your effort.  Georgian is one of the 62 languages that Firefox ships in and we are proud to have you as part of the team!

Today, we filed the release tracker bug for the Vietnamese localization to participate in Firefox 3.1.  If you look at that bug, you can see all the other bugs we have filed to get this localization ready for release (something I just blogged about).

The Vietnamese team has been incredibly motivated and responsive in working toward their goal of participating in FF 3.1.  But, this is also a great example of teamwork and assistance from the l10n-drivers.  Gandalf and Gen have been closely working to finalize a localization for Vietnamese.  It’s not done yet, but we’re much closer.

The story behind it is very interesting.  Sometimes, in our world of localization, it happens that two or more efforts are started on a translation and those teams surface at different times before the final localization is ready.  In most cases, the teams start working together to finish the work.  You can imagine that this is not the easiest undertaking.  A lot of pride and time goes into the individual work.  When translations surfaces from multiple teams, the l10n-drivers works with all the individuals to figure out what is the best next step.  We strive to serve as the most objective intermediary and find an agreeable solution.  In this case, we had two translations from two teams from different regions in Vietnam.  Naturally, some differences in their work arose.  The teams presented their work separately, both with good efforts that were nearly complete.  At that point, we had to come together to decide what was best.  We even enlisted the help of a native, 3rd-party Vietnamese speaker to help evaluate.  But, the teams moved more quickly than we could and consolidated efforts to one.  Along the way, Gandalf put in a lot of effort in communicating with them to help get to this solution.  Also, with Silme, Gandalf provided technical assistance to help reconcile any differences.  Many thanks to Jasper and Hung from the Vietnamese teams.  Now, we’ll work on all the other aspecs necessary to localize, like the local web services.  We are getting close and hoping to get them into the release cycle for Firefox 3.1.

In our Firefox l10n pipeline, with no particular order:  Vietnamese, Kazakh, Mexican Spanish, Bengali (Bengladesh), and Bosnian.  By “in the pipeline”, I mean we have had some recent activity with the localization teams and are working in some way to get them closer to shipping.

On Friday, October 24, the L10n-drivers team spent the evening preparing six new languages for launch with the release of Firefox 3.0.4.  We then headed straight to Barcelona for the Mozilla EU camp that took place over the weekend.  While I was there, a number of community members who are not localizers asked me what exactly goes into “getting new languages ready” for the final release.  I thought I would write a bit about that final push.

When we think of the localization process, it’s easy to think of localizers as the guys who translate the words of the Firefox user interface into another language.  But, it’s important to remember that localizers are the individuals making recommendations about what other services to include in Firefox to make that end-user experience the best.  Stas has done a nice job creating this page that describes the web services included in localized versions of Firefox.  Bugs are filed to determine the setup for the following:

• Search engines for each locale (this is a blocker bug for new locales’ beta releases)
• Protocol handlers
• RSS readers
• RSS Sample feed
• “Getting started” page

This “Bugogram” describes exactly what bugs are filed and who is responsible.

You can see it becoming clear that the localizers job is much more than just translation.  Localizers help create the user experience by assisting Mozilla in what other organizations might call “business development”.

Performing all of this research is one thing we do when “getting languages ready”.  Once the webservices team (lead by Stas) has gathered all of this information, we must do the technical work to implement these suggestions.

Here’s what happens next.

Each potential search provider, rss reader application, or websites listed on the Getting Started page has to verify in Bugzilla (or with Stas & the localizer by email) that they are OK with being included.  Once we have that, we change the code in each l10n repository to include in the suggestion.  Those code snippets from the partners have to be checked in before the code freeze date or the translated version of Firefox will not include the suggestions.  In the past, we’ve even decided not to ship a locale if too many of these issues remain open before code freeze.  But, we’ve started to ship locales as beta versions so the localizer can get their translation live and used and can continue to resolve the oustanding issues.

Another big part of getting a localization ready for shipping is translation of the webparts of each local version.  Pascal manages this process.  He creates a set of bugs that track the progress of the translation of webparts.  Localization teams must translate the First Run and Getting Started pages.  Download landing pages also need to be translated.

When a localization ships and is made available to the public for download, a new user sees all of this work as part of the defaul local experience.

In the comment field of this bug, I’ve listed three bugs from that Friday that Gandalf, Stas and I worked on very very late one night.  I helped Stas by creating a few patches to include Wikipedia search plugins.  Gandalf reviewd my patches and checked them into Mercurial.

In case you’re following my personal contributions to Mozilla…yes, these are my first patches to the code. Have I crossed the event horizon and am I on my way to being a dirty hacker?  Unlikely…anyone can write these patches.

I’m sitting here with a lot of the Mozilla Europe Localization community and should be listening more closely to Pike, who is giving a presentation on testing localizations…but I had to share this news. 

Check out this bug, which lands six new languages to Firefox with the release of FF 3.0.4.

We’ve added the new localization for users in the following locales:

• Bulgarian
• Esperanto
• Estonian
• Latvian
• Occitan
• Welsh

Congratulations to Ogi (bg), Eduardo (eo), Sander (et), Raivis (lv), Yannig (oc), and Dewi & David (cy) for all your hard work!!  You’re now officially shipping Firefox…well, soon, when FF 3.0.4 is released. 

Special thanks to Pike for driving the technical aspects of this release, Stas who managed the web services of this release, and Pascal on webparts.  This the first release that Stas managed, so please send us some feedback.  I think he did a great job.  Finally, Gandalf stepped in sometime around 5 AM the day before the release to write a few patches and check in the code.  It was a real team process…

Now the fun stuff.  The numbers!

With these new localizations, 94.29%* of the World’s Internet population is covered by Firefox 2 and 3.

*  Remember when I explained how Gerv created this model and we used it to measure impact?  I still need to make this model more complete; caveat emptor, this is not the most accurate analysis…but I think it’s very close.

I posted this message to the dev-l10n mailing list, but if you did not see it there or do not subscribe to that list, here is a secondary posting.

The string freeze for the Firefox 3.1 beta 2 is going to be Thursday, October 30 at 11:59 PM (Mountain View, CA time), which is just over two weeks from now.  Code freeze will be Tuesday, November 4 (Mountain View, CA time) at 11:59 PM.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3.1/StatusMeetings/2008-10-15#Firefox_3.1

If you did not make FF 3.1 beta 1, we would love for you to participate in the next beta release.  The l10n-drivers team has a goal of a fully-localized beta, so please let us know what we can do to help you as you get in beta 2.  We are here to help you so please just ask.

Here are some important resources for you to check:

*  Pike’s l10n dashboard:  http://l10n.mozilla.org/dashboard/
*  L10n Tinderbox:  http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=Mozilla-l10n
*  Mercurial tips and tools:  http://developer.mozilla.org/En/L10n_on_Mercurial

If you run into problems, please ask for help in the dev-l10n group, on #l10n, or on #hg.  You can always comment on this blog or email me.

Just like last time, we would love volunteers who participated in beta 1 to mentor other localizers.  If you’re feeling comfortable with hg and have some cycles, please follow up on this thread and offer your help.  :)

Finally, many thanks to the localization teams who participated in localizing FF 3.1 beta 1.  Congratulations!  That was the highest number of locales to participate in a beta 1.  We shipped FF 3.1b1 yesterday and you can see the list of participating locales here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

It’s a pleasure working with you all, so please ping me directly with questions or requests for help.  I want to hear from you.