Please note some of the information provided in this report may be subject to change as we are sometimes sharing information about projects that are still in early stages and are not final yet.

Welcome!

New localizers

Kumar Ritu Raj just finished localizing and testing Focus Android v5 in Angika language (which is going to launch soon!) and he is doing BCA from TP College, BNMU, Bihar, India. Welcome and congratulations!

Common Voice: Jimi of Danish and Dimitris of Greek, thank you for taking the lead in your respective language.

Are you a locale leader and want us to include new members in our upcoming reports? Contact us!

New community/locales added

We recently added several locales to Pontoon: Arpitan (frp), Canadian English (en-CA), Cornish (kw), Iloko (ilo). If you speak any of these languages and want to help, take a look at Pontoon or get in touch.

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Activity Stream

Activity Stream has become an integral part of Firefox, officially replacing the existing New Tab and soon integrating code for displaying snippets and onboarding content. For this reason, we’re working on moving translations to mozilla-central.

Currently, Activity Stream is managed as a stand-alone project in Pontoon, and store its translations in a GitHub repository. Once this meta bug is fixed, Activity Stream’s strings will be exposed as part of the Firefox project.

While this makes the relation between Activity Stream and Firefox more obvious for localizers, it will also allow to make some improvements in the future, like reducing the lag between translations landing in repositories and actually being available for testing in Firefox.

Release schedule

There are some changes in the release schedule for the Summer, with the Nightly cycle for 63 lasting 10 weeks instead of 8, and the effects of this change rippling to the end of year.

Does this impact you as a localizer? Luckily, not really, thanks to cross-channel. Just don’t forget to keep an eye on the deadlines in Pontoon for the Firefox project, and you’ll be all set.

If you’re curious, you can always check the official Release Calendar.

Fluent migrations

We were waiting for the 61 Nightly cycle to end before resuming migrations. The first bug on the schedule for 62 landed on Tuesday and migrated almost 30 strings used in Privacy related permission dialogs (camera, location, pop-ups, etc.), with a second one already in review (over 20 strings, used in JavaScript across subdialogs in Preferences).

Shield studies

Shield studies are A/B tests, deployed to a specific portion of Firefox users, designed to test features or changes and analyze their impact.

So far, these studies have been targeting only English users (with one exception), and didn’t require localization. This week we started localizing our first study: it’s an extension that will be enabled initially only for Nightly, and for a limited number of locales (4) that have a significant population on the Nightly channel. We will also expose the opt-out preference for Shield studies, together with the about:studies page, to all languages in Firefox in the coming days.

If you’re interested in Shield studies, you can find more details in this wiki page.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

There’s been quite a few things going on in mobile world recently, as you’ve probably noticed.

We’ve recently exposed strings for the upcoming release of Firefox iOS v12, that aims to launch around June 12th. The tentative deadline for localizing and testing is May 23rd. Screenshots are updated twice a week.

Firefox for Amazon Fire TV is shipping an update very soon, probably some time next week. We’ll be getting updated screenshots for testing very soon, stay tuned!

Same for Focus Android v5 that is coming up, and will feature three new locales: Angika (anp), Cornish (kw) and Purépecha (tsz). Congrats to the localizers involved in this effort!

Firefox for Android is updating to v60 as we speak, and is being progressively rolled out to users.

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Common Voice was launched on May 2nd in 29 languages. Thanks to many communities’ active participation to get to the finish line, especially with quite a bit of last minute changes. More languages will be added as they reach the completion criteria.

The team has been continually impressed with the thoroughness of communities around the globe down to the wire, to test, to identify issues, and they have not stopped just because the product or their language is launched. The bugs keep coming, not just for translation but for site stability and UX issues. Here is one example.

Currently, only the website is localizable. The next step is to start recording voices in new languages. To that end, we need sentences for people to read in these new languages. The Common Voice team is participating the Mozilla’s Global Sprint to help collect and review new sentences for people to read. Only after that, the team will start collecting voice data in a new language.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

On the advocacy and fundraising side, we’ve had an opportunity to respond to the Clear History feature announced by Facebook during the F8 conference, but the team is mostly focusing on the long term strategy on how to move the conversation to the broader data and privacy topic.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

We’re happy to announce that Vishal Sharma and Pramit Singhi will be joining us for the Google Summer of Code project this year! They will help us improve the path to first contribution, including the homepage redesign and guiding new users to submitting their first translation. That should help us grow l10n communities.

Pontoon now runs compare-locales checks when you submit a translation – the same library that is used during the Firefox build process. That allows Pontoon to prevent you from submitting translations that can break Firefox. Read more about the updates we made to the way quality checks work.

Pontoon now allows you to translate strings across all projects in a single translation interface, which helps you work on all untranslated strings in one go, or review all pending suggestions submitted by your team contributors. We also changed the way search works by bringing it closer to the default behaviour of search engines.

More relevant communications for Engagement projects

We realized that several communications we send to the dev.l10n.web mailing list concern only a small subset of locales, and are meant to be ignored by the vast majority of people. In order to keep the signal-to-noise ratio low, we are changing the way we communicate project updates like snippets and newsletters. From now on, we will try to rely as much as possible on Pontoon built-in notification system, allowing us to send notifications only to existing contributors in the target locales. This way, communications in dev.l10n.web should be more relevant for everyone.

This also means people contributing to Engagement projects won’t get notification directly in their inbox, but using the Pontoon Tools add-on from Michal Stanke will get you almost real-time notifications in your browser. If you’re usually contributing to those projects, please keep an eye on Pontoon notifications if you don’t want to miss schedule, deadline or context about new content.

Events

If you’re planning to meet your fellow teammates this year, or planning an event with other locales, make sure to check our plans for l10n meetups in 2018 and the process to organize meetups. We can’t wait to see the meetup ideas you may have!

Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Reach out to any l10n-driver and we’ll include that (see links to emails at the bottom of this report)

Localization impact by the numbers

Snippets

In Q1, 78 localized snippets generated 2,131,516,000 impressions (for real!!).

Of the 78 snippets, 26 snippets had links that generated 125,000 clicks (whoa!!).

Friends of the Lion

Felix, also known as Djfe, leads the way in filing the number of issues for Common Voice project. Reported problems include translations, functionality testing and UI designs. Thank you for your active participation as a localizer and as a Mozillian!

Know someone in your l10n community who’s been doing a great job and should appear here? Contact on of the l10n-drivers and we’ll make sure they get a shout-out (see list at the bottom)!

Useful Links

Questions? Want to get involved?

Did you enjoy reading this report? Let us know how we can improve by reaching out to any one of the l10n-drivers listed above.