I didn't write the Q3 report, so this report covers both Q3 and Q4.
Regular l10n-drivers work such as patch reviews, pushes to production, meetings and past projects maintenance excluded.
samedi 3 janvier 2015
I didn't write the Q3 report, so this report covers both Q3 and Q4.
Regular l10n-drivers work such as patch reviews, pushes to production, meetings and past projects maintenance excluded.
jeudi 19 décembre 2013
It's the end of the quarter, just list last quarter I wrote down a summary of what I did this quarter for Mozilla for posterity, here it is ;)
Once again, I spent significant time working on tools this quarter. My activity was focused on Transvision, Langchecker and my FirefoxOS minidashboard.
There were 2 releases of Transvision, 2.9 and 3.0, adding many new features and additional support for Gaia repositories. I also created a #transvision IRC channel on Mozilla IRC server. You can now search strings for 3 locales simultaneaously, check all existing translations for an entity, list all potentially wrong varables in your repo or quickly check all strings that need some extra QA for Firefox OS.
There were also many improvements to langchecker, the tool that I now maintain with my colleague Francesco Lodolo to track and manage progress of translations for projects using our .lang format. Many views were improved and we added features specific to the metadata used on mozilla.org (page activation and home page promos). We also added checks for UTF8 validity of the source files as well as checks for broken or missing python-style replacement variables in translations. We can also know how much of our l10n user base we cover not only per page but also per string on a page, which allows us to decide when we can activate a minor but visible text change on our pages (recently for example, html meta description and title tag changed for SEO reasons on the Firefox download pages).
As for my FirefoxOS mini dashboard (which syndicates data from the l10n dashboard, the langchecker and also contains some manually maintained data sources), it followed Gaia progresses and now tracks Gaia 1.1 and 1.2 in addition to the master branch.
This quarter I found 8 new localizers for mozilla.org and key Firefox web parts for the following locales: Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Czech, Slovak and Spanish (Mexico). As usual I tried to focus on helping teams that lack manpower and / or maintain Firefox for a minor language.
I also created / revived IRC channels for these locales to help community building: Catalan (#mozilla-cat), Slovak (#mozilla-sk) and Serbian (#mozilla.sr).
If we can find 5 to 10 localizers working on key content every quarter, we shouldn't have any problem growing with all of our locales together in the years to come, the thing is that we have to be proactive and look for these people and not wait for them to come to us :),
The only event I went to was the Mozilla Summit, it was great and very productive from a localization point of view, I worked with Dwayne who maintains Locamotion, the Pootle instance focused on Mozilla projects for minor locales (Firefox, mozilla.org content, Firefox OS, Firefox health report) and we worked on improving our collaboration. One of the immediate results this quarter is that now we automate imports of strings for mozilla.org from Locamotion, which takes us a few minutes of work per week and is faster for both Dwayne and ourselves. We are working on how to make it easier for locales on Locamotion to also follow mozilla.org work as this happens at a much quicker pace than product localization.
I also talked and worked with many localizers either on their specific issues (for example Brano and Wlado from the Slovak team asked me for help finding new localizers) or to check what problems a locale has and how to fix them.
A lot of work happened on mozilla.org this quarter. The most visible one is that we now have the home page available in 55 languages, versus 28 at the end of the last quarter. This is a steadily growing number, I hope that we can get the page in 70 locales, the most important is of course maintenance over time. The home page received also several updates promoting various topics and we scaled out l10n work to cover that (end of year donation promo, lightbeam, webmaker, addons). The webdev team implemented a way for us (l10n-drivers) to manage the activation of promos on the home page without code changes thanks to metadata in our lang files, that allowed us to never show mixed language content on the home page and activate these promos for locales as they get done.
Key pages in the main menu (products, mission, about, contribute) are all localizable and localized to about the same scale as the main page. Other key download pages (firefox/channels and firefox/installer-help) pages are also now translated anf maintained at large scale. Lightbeam and State of Mozilla sections were proposed as opt-in projects and have many translations (between 15 and 20 languages). I am happy that we were able to scale the localization of mozilla.org in terms of content (more pages, more content for products), number of locales and locale-specific improvements on the mozilla.org platform (better rtl support, better fonts, l10n friendly templates..), and our management tools to allow us to grow.
Another cool l10n feature that happened on the site was the creation of a 'translation bar' proposing you a mozilla.org page in your language if it exists. This was entirely done by a volunteer Mozillian, Kohei Yoshino, many thanks to him for this cool feature that may expand to other Mozilla sites ! Kohei wrote about it on the webdev blog. It is really cool to see improvements brought by volunteers and it is also cool to see that many people in the webdev team are also acquiring an l10n culture and often spot potential problems before myself or flod get to them !
That's all for this quarter, overall an excellent quarter for mozilla.org and tools which improve steadily. On a side note, it is also an excellent quarter for me at a personal level as my daughter was born last month (which explains why I am less often connected these days ;) )
lundi 4 novembre 2013
Dans mon boulot on travaille uniquement avec des fichiers source en UTF8, notre site principal est en python mais j'ai des outils de maintenance extérieurs au site qui sont en PHP, étant donné que l'on travaille avec une bonne centaine de bénévoles qui ont accès au svn où nous stockons les fichiers de traduction et que nous avons des milliers de fichiers, il arrive qu'un bénévole envoie un fichier dans le mauvais encodage (genre Latin 1 pour certains europeéns et UTF16 pour certains asiatiques) et là, pour Django, c'est le drame :)
En bash on peut lister tous ces fichiers assez facilement et se créer un alias pour ça :
find . -type f -name "*.lang" -exec file --mime {} + | grep -viE "utf-8|us-ascii"
(via mon collègue italien Francesco Lodolo bien meilleur que moi en bash :) )
Ça marche bien mais je préfèrerais pouvoir afficher cette information dans mes tableaux de bords que je consulte en permanence, j'avais donc besoin d'une fonction pour détecter l'encodage des fichiers et j'ai pas mal sué pour trouver quelque chose qui marche correctement.
Ma première solution qui marchait a été celle là :
function isUTF8($file)
{
return in_array(exec('file --mime-encoding -b ' . $file), ['utf-8', 'us-ascii']) ? true : false;
}
Je délégais donc au shell la détection du charset, ça marche bien, mais ça a plusieurs inconvénients. Le premier est que ça ne marche pas sous Windows, même si j'avoue que c'est pas ma priorité, l'une des forces de PHP est tout de même sa compatibilité cross-plateforme. Le deuxième problème est que j'aime pas faire des exec, je trouve souvent ça un peu crade et c'est en général l'indice que j'ai pas réussi à le faire en PHP, le troisième problème et c'est le plus grave pour moi c'est que c'est très très lent. En local avec un disque SSD, un script qui mettait 3 secondes à s'éxécuter (et qui parsait déjà un petit millier de fichiers pour chercher des erreurs de variables python dans des chaînes) est passé à 18 secondes avec cette fonction et est interrompu sur le serveur qui n'a probablement pas de ssd pour dépasser les 30 secondes.function isUTF8($filename)
{
$info = finfo_open(FILEINFO_MIME_ENCODING);
$type = finfo_buffer($info, file_get_contents($filename));
finfo_close($info);
return ($type == 'utf-8' || $type == 'us-ascii') ? true : false;
}
La fonction ci-dessus correspond bien à mon besoin: pouvoir détecter si l'encodage d'un fichier est en utf-8 ou compatible utf-8 pour une utilisation sur le Web. Si quelqu'un a une meilleure solution, je suis bien sûr preneur :)mardi 1 octobre 2013
I spent significantly more time on tool this quarter than in the past, I am also happy to say that Transvision is now a 6 people team and that we will all be at Brussels for the Summit (see my blog post in April). I like it, I like to create the small tools and scripts that make my life or localizers life better.
Since we merged all of our major websites (mozilla.org, mozilla.com, mozilla-europe.org, mozillamessaging.com) under the single mozilla.org domain name two years ago with a new framework based on Django, we have gained in consistency but localization of several backends under one single domain and a new framework slowed us down for a while. I'd say that we are now mostly back to the old mozilla.com speed of localization, lots of bugs and features were added to Bedrok (nickname of our Django-powered site), we have a very good collaboration with the webdev/webprod teams on the site and we are more people working on it. I think this quarter localizer felt that a lot more work was asked from them on mozilla.org, I'll try to make sure we don't loose locales on the road, this is a website that hosts content for 90 locales, but we are back to speed with tons of new people!
This quarter, I tried to spend some time looking for localizers to work on web content as well as acompanying volunteers that contact us. I know that I am good at finding volunteers that share our values and are achievers, unfortunately I don't have that much time to spend on that. Hopefully I will be able to spend a few days on that every quarter because we need to grow and we need to grow with the best open source contributors! :)
In a nutshell, a very busy quarter! If you want to speak about some of it with me, I will be at the Mozilla Summit in Brussels this week :)
samedi 2 janvier 2010
jeudi 2 juillet 2009
Although I got into the mozilla project through en-user documentation and support around 2001, I really got involved in Web localization in 2003 when I started to build a Spanish Mozilla community around the Mozilla Suite and I convinced Bob Clary (who also gave me my canconfirm rights in bugzilla, thanks for that!) to publish a page in Spanish on mozilla.org so as to promote Tech Evangelism activities in Spanish.
That was the first non-English page on an official mozilla site ever and the funny thing is that... this page is still online! ;)
We are now in July 2009 and we just shipped Firefox 3.5 in more than 70 languages, all with a set of in-product pages hosted on mozilla.com. But more than in-product pages, we now have with this release a localized home page on mozilla.com for ALL of our locales!
Now that the release is done and millions of users are downloading the best version of Firefox ever every day, I have some time to thank all of the people that have made such an achievement possible.
Thank you to our localizers first, without them, the Mozilla project would not have the international outreach it has and I really think that our localizers are way more than translators, they are involved in every corner of mozilla activities, from code, to marketing and documentation. It is a privilege for us to work with people having so many skills and passionate about FLOSS and the open web!
Thank you also to the rest of the l10n-drivers team (Seth, Axel, Stas, Gandalf...) and thank you to Delphine who did an awesome job with QA of all of the localized pages over the past weeks on our sites!
Happy international browsing :)
Pascal
dimanche 17 mai 2009
Firefox 3.5 is soon to be released and everybody is working hard in the Mozilla community to make it as great a release as were the previous ones!
This is the perfect moment for you to get involved by helping you local localization team preparing translations for our websites, the sooner our websites are ready in 70 languages, the sooner Firefox 3.5 will be released.
Pages called directly from Firefox like the start page, download pages on mozilla.com, product pages on regional sites, documentation for web developers explaining what new technologies they will find in the product, end-user support documentation, translation of Add-Ons, marketing mini-sites being created for the release...
There are tons of ways you can make a real difference in the Mozilla project, especially if you are not an English speaker as the majority of our users are now using a non-English version of Firefox.
if you want to help change the web in your language, just contact your localization team and ask them how you can help, you can also contact me directly of course (pascal AT mozilla DOT com).
jeudi 5 février 2009
As every year, Mozilla is going to be at Fosdem with a booth and our own conference room where you will be able to meet with the people behind the different branches of the Mozilla tree (Mozilla Corporation, Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Europe, Community members and other European Mozilla related associations...).
Lots of fun ahead, lots of interesting talks and a great opportunity to chat or have a drink with the people that make Firefox, Thunderbird, Fennec, Sunbird and all the amazing software based on the Mozilla platform.
It is also a great opportunity to get involved in the Mozilla community, and particularly in helping us translating and promoting Firefox in Europe!!
We have lots of things to do for the upcoming releases of Firefox 3.1 and Thunderbird 3.0, especially on the web pages front where we definitely need volunteers for all of the languages we support.
We also need more people getting involved in helping our local community websites grow and do more things like publishing news items, helping in forums, going to local open source events, organizing parties...
If you want to get involved in localization, promote Mozilla in your language or even get into Quality Assurance and make sure Mozilla products get even better with time... Really, don't hesitate and come to our booth or talk to us in the Fosdem corridors.
Have a great Fosdem 2009!!!
mercredi 31 décembre 2008
This post is a follow up to a previous post last month anouncing our first work on localized home pages hosted on mozilla.com.
We now have 26 languages (28 if we count en-US and pt-BR which we already had) with a localized download page for Firefox on our main portal. Several of these locales are 'beta locales', that is localized versions of Firefox which may still countain a few language bugs such as typos or inconsistencies in language. Of course, if you are a native speaker of one of these new locales, your feedback on the translation is very welcome!
I had targeted 37 locales under-represented on mozilla web properties as the first batch of prioritary locales for this project, out of the 11 remaining, 5 are still a short-term target (Bulgarian, Estonian, Esperanto, Welsh and Mongolian) since we have Firefox 3 versions available for them. The remaining 6 are more middle term targets as they are more likely targetting a first release when Firefox 3.1 is out.
Here is the list of languages done:
Great job from all of our localizers and a good start for better download pages in 2009!
NEW YEARS EVE UPDATE: Esperanto is done and published!
mardi 18 novembre 2008
As you may have learned recently on Seth's blog, we have been working lately on creating translated landing pages on mozilla.com for all of the locales that are not already supported on an official regional portal (that is those not on Mozilla Europe/China/Japan).
Now that I have a bit of time I can blog a bit about how this project is going.
We have created this week landing pages on mozilla.com for 7 of our locales (Afrikaans, Frisian, Irish, Indonesian, Georgian, Slovene, Swedish) which is a good start given that we (Laura and me) plan to have all of the 37 locales we are targeting done by the end of the year. By the way, the list of targeted locales is on the Web Dashboard, if your language is on the list of languages we are targeting, don't hesitate to come and help with the translation!
So what does it change for let's say a Slovene user compared to the previous situation? Until one week ago, a user with Internet Explorer in Slovene going to getfirefox.com or mozilla.com was redirected to mozilla.com/en-US/ and was offered a link to download Firefox in Slovene but the page was all written in English. This is good enough for people speaking English as a second language, but our target audience is no longer the computer and English savvy advanced users. We were certainly losing potential users for one of these reasons:
It is very clear to me that translating a whole portal like mozilla.com and keeping it up to date is not scalable. Maintaining a reduced version of a portal like we do on Mozilla Europe for 22 languages is already a very big task and could be seen as an ideal solution, but many of the locales we are speaking about have little human resources to keep and, more importantly, maintain an entire web site.
Another drawback of a multilingual portal is that any technical change in the reference language (English) may have an impact on localized pages. This is particularily true for stylesheet changes, I have already seen minor visual fixes on an English page impacting negatively the same page for other languages. So as to avoid that, updates on the English version have to be very carefully done and planned and lots of QA of localized pages has to be done when some files are updated in English. Definitely, this is not scalable or would be possible for a handful of languages only.
The solution chosen is one single landing page to propose the download of Firefox, give a few informations (among which a link to the locale's community portal) and also a link to Thunderbird pages in English. We have a separate stylesheet for that and we only share a cut-down version of the mozilla.com template. Our Hebrew localizer is also working on a Right-To-Left stylesheet, thanks Tomer for that!
Additionally, offering the right locale in a page written into the right language is not the only good news about it. This is also going to help promoting localized versions of Firefox more easily with a short url such as www.mozilla.com/af for Afrikaans. Great for printed material, banners or simply to give the url of the site verbally to a friend. This will also allow us to do real Search Engine Optimization in the user's language (as we did in the past on mozilla-europe.org) and one of the next things to do will be to evaluate the wording of this page for better result, I'll open bugs about it and we will work with our communities on optimizing the language for better search results. By the way, these pages are in Google results since this morning, which is a good start :)
One other good news is that we promote on this page community portals, which means that this will give more visibility to these portals and hopefully new contributors will join the Mozilla project.
Here is the list of current languages done (in the visitor's language so as to give it a small SEO boost ;) ):
UPDATE:
One more locale done today, Galician:
jeudi 21 août 2008
UPDATE: our translations are now complete, special thanks to Brian(and his team), Gia and Aleks for stepping up and helping us finishing our work on this bug, now Major Update is just around the corner ;)
If you are part of the Mozilla community, speak Georgian, Mongolian or Belarusian and want to help, you may want to check out this bug:
Translation needed for strings on the new Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 Major Update box
It's a short and easy translation (15 words in total) and our usual contributors are not available at the moment to do it, so if you want to help Mozilla by contributing to Firefox, that's an excellent opportunity to get involved!
Thanks in advance!
mardi 12 août 2008
Thanks to the hard work of Ricardo Meza and his team, the first language pack in Mexican Spanish (es-MX) is now available on addons.mozilla.org (AMO):
Español (México) Language Pack 3.0.2pre
This lang pack is still in the sandbox so you will need an account on AMO and be logged in to be able to install it.
More information (in Spanish) on the Mozilla Mexico localization portal as well as on the Mozilla Hispano news site: