août 2006

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mardi 29 août 2006

Le blog n'est pas devenu anglophone ;)

Pour les lecteurs ne comprenant pas l'anglais, je vous rassure, le blog n'est pas devenu d'un coup exclusivement anglophone !

Les articles en anglais concernent mes activités au sein de mozilla europe/mozilla.com dans le domaine de la localisation des pages destinées à Firefox 2, ils sont donc destinés à un lectorat ne lisant pas forcément le français.

Si vous ne voulez suivre que les billets en français de mon carnet, vous pouvez utiliser ce fil rss :

http://chevrel.org/fr/carnet/rss.php?lang=fr

dimanche 27 août 2006

Understanding localization traps

My English-speaking readers may think that localization is just a step you have to think about when you make software, like burning the CDs, having promotional T-shirts printed or visuals for the press and trade-shows. That's actually a big mistake and a mistake that many projects experienced the hard way. For any big software project, localization is not one of the final steps of the software production process, localization has to be part of the whole process.

That's true for software and that's true for web content. Actually, I would compare it with designing standards-compliant web pages. Many web-designers make web pages using old crappy html hacks dating back to the late 90s and when the project is nearing completion they decide to make it standards compliant. The result is that they spend way more time twiddling with their code to make it pass the HTML validator than they would have spent learning how to directly produce well structured html.

Of course you always think that your framework is well designed, that your page template is flexible and that the text is pretty simple and therefore shouldn't be difficult to translate... Self-confidence is the biggest mistake, that's forgetting Murphy's laws: if things can go wrong, they will go wrong. Things that look simple and straight-forward to you are likely to be considered way more complex with somebody's else eyes, especially if he is from a different culture.

A few common traps we had to deal with in Mozilla Europe :

  • Translations are usually 30% longer than the original text, not only because English has a less verbose syntax but also (and probably mostly) because you have to transpose an English way of explaining things into your own language. That's usually not a problem, except when you have to make the text fit in a small little graphics box like the download box or a menu item, "Free Download" or "Press area" can be a long sentence in some languages.

  • What happens if there is no version of the software in the language of the visitor because it hasn't been released yet? We chose to propose both the newer English version and the last version of the software that is available in the visitor's language. But wait, wouldn't a Czech be more happy with a newer Slovak version than an English one? Isn't a Catalan or Galician more likely to prefer a Spanish version of Firefox or Thunderbird if it is not available in their language rather than an English version? That's the kind of problems that impact not only the visual design but also the script logic behind the scene, something you have to discuss with localizers because they know best.

  • Screenshots. Supporting 22 languages means supporting 22 different sets of screenshots, it means using as neutral as possible webpages pictures, without references to a specific culture. The Mozilla.com Firefox screenshots on the right column are examples of something we can't really use since they are US-centric, a "way to san jose" text in the search bar or the New York Times - CNN tab titles don't really cut it in Cyrillic language...

  • Text as images are usually a bad practice as they can't be re-used in other languages and are simply more difficult to update, see for example the Firefox has been updated page. This page isn't localized yet but one thing is sure, either we remove these text-based images or we automatically generate them server-side which can prove tricky. (Actually, there is a third solution which is to use SVG or Canvas, which would I think make sense for a Firefox only page).

  • The original text may simply be irrelevant in the target language or need a total rewrite to make sense. Here is an example taken from mozilla.com current download page that is not really relevant outside of the US : Firefox 1.5 (Windows version) is also the first browser to meet US federal government requirements that software be easily accessible to users with physical impairments.. If you want to reuse this point, you need to know what the current situation is with your own regional laws, but most of all, it poses the problem of geography targeting vs. language targeting. This point is valid for a US citizen, who may speak Spanish as his first language, but not for an English native speaker living in Belfast. The fact that translations are planned may impact the very content of your original text.

The above points are just a few examples to show that the devil is in the details, and once you deal with many languages you have to deal with many details related to culture, fonts, visual design and even unexpected Gecko bugs in Right To Left languages for instance. Of course, if it were as easy as it looks at first sight, all big projects would have multilingual websites.

In this article, I just talked about a few technical traps to underline what kind of problems you are likely to meet when working on content meant to be internationalised, but let's not forget the human factor in a project where web content localization means dozens more people involved in the project living in different countries and timezones. We certainly have to work on making this collaborative work easier for web content just as we did in the last two years product-wise. The English-section of this blog is one of the tools I will use to get feedback from the community but more things are coming.

If you want to follow the English articles only from the blog, use this RSS feed: http://chevrel.org/fr/carnet/rss.php?lang=en

lundi 21 août 2006

Firefox, languages and localized content

Hello,

My name is Pascal Chevrel, among other things I am a Mozilla Europe board member and I have been blogging about Mozilla technologies for about 4 years in both French and Spanish. As you can see, I have decided to start blogging in English as well, so please excuse my French ;)

What kind of stuff can you expect to read here? Mostly web content localization news. My main task at Mozilla Europe is to coordinate the translation work so as to offer official Mozilla content in as many European languages as possible. We started with 4 languages more than 2 years ago and we now have a website offering content in 22 European languages. But not only do we host European languages, we also host via our mozilla-world alias the Firefox start pages for almost all Firefox languages (ex : http://www.mozilla-world.org/he/products/firefox/start/central.html).

So as to give you an idea, we have about 20 million visits per month and so far we are totalizing 1.6 billion hits for 2006. Quite a lot of traffic...

Actually, it also reflects the huge European success of Firefox and how language support matters for the success of the Mozilla project. People want Firefox and Thunderbird, but they want it in their language, computer geeks fluent in English may be happy with an English browser, but my mother won't even consider using a software that isn't in her language.

The Mozilla project was born at Netscape and then hosted by AOL. One of the reasons why AOL/Netscape, although a big corporation compared to Mozilla, failed getting back market-share with Netscape 7 is simple, it was usually available in 5 languages only (US-English, German, French, Japanese, Brasilian Portuguese) and you could wait months after the English realease before seeing the browser released in your language, sometimes, the localized build was available on the FTP but the official website only offered the English build or worse, a much older version. Furthermore, the quality of the translation wasn't always that good, at least for French... For Joe-user, Netscape was English-only, a showstopper for most of the global population.

Languages matter and it is one of the things the Mozilla project is good at. The quality of our software localisation is excellent and Firefox and Thunderbird are available in a great number of languages (currently 37) including several minor languages which are not even considered as a "market" by proprietary software vendors. If you look at Rafael Ebron's High Level Product Comparative Analysis between Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2, you see that IE7 will be released in 15 languages only which means that we definitely have a strong asset here since we already support 37 languages and we may even have more languages available in the future.

Mozilla Europe was created and is maintained by European volunteers because of that, because we believe that localisation is key to the success of Mozilla products, because we believe that the opensource model is a great solution for software localisation; for many people, it is even the only way to have software on their machine in their mother tongue...

Teaming up with Mozilla.com and Mozilla Japan, we will definitely use the expertise we gained managing a multilingual project over the last two years so as to provide more and better localized content for Firefox 2.

mardi 8 août 2006

Swift: Navigateur Webkit pour Windows

Le premier navigateur basé sur WebKit (moteur de rendu de Safari) pour Windows vient d'être présenté. GetWebKit-Swift, est encore une version très préliminaire, il lui manque encore beaucoup de fonctions pour en faire un navigateur réellement utilisable, mais c'est le premier à permettre de voir ses pages dans un moteur basé sur khtml sur Windows, ce qui est très appréciable pour les tests.

Capture écran (on peut voir qu'il a encore du mal avec l'UTF8 mais la mise en page CSS est parfaitement respectée) :

jeudi 3 août 2006

HTML-Kit pour Linux

Sous Windows j'utilise depuis des années HTML-Kit comme éditeur de texte, il est très puissant, néanmoins assez simple d'utilisation et il a deux atouts géniaux : la pré-visualisation des pages dans gecko (et IE) directement dans l'interface et un client ftp graphique très bien intégré et très intuitif.

Il a deux gros défauts, le premier est que c'est un éditeur maintenant assez ancien, qui ne travaille pas en unicode, le second est qu'il ne marche pas sous Linux.

Paradoxalement, cet éditeur de texte est l'une des choses qui me manque le plus sous Linux qui a pourtant pléthore d'éditeurs, mais aucun vraiment bien foutu pour le html/css à mon avis.

La bonne nouvelle est qu'une nouvelle version réécrite (grace à Mono) de HTML-kit pour Linux est en développement, j'aurai donc de nouveau bientôt accès à mon éditeur de textes favoris ! Vu la popularité d'HTML-kit dans le monde Windows, ça peut aussi favoriser des conversions à Linux.