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

Amadou Sileymane Guèye has joined the Fulah localization team and has worked relentlessly in helping projects stay up to date in Pontoon. Fun fact: he is known for his high proficiency in the language and also for solving extremely difficult crossword puzzles in Fulah! Welcome!

New community/locales added

Sicilian (scn), Luxembourgish (lb), and Shuar (jiv) started translating Firefox on Pontoon. If you speak any of those languages, get in touch to help!

While Amharic (am) is not a brand new locale, it has recently known a period of revival. They are going to ship their first localized Mozilla product next week, which is Focus for Android. Congrats!

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

Wondering why there weren’t new strings to translate for Firefox in the past few weeks? We hit a bit of a roadblock with cross-channel and merge day. Axel is working hard on finding a solution, we’re going to resume exposing new strings as soon as possible.

The current queue consists of about 130 strings, most of them belong to the new about:devtools page. This is the first step in decoupling Firefox Developer Tools from the main application, moving them into an add-on that can be disabled on release and beta channels.

We have also uncovered a couple of wide-spread (and long standing) l10n bugs.

PKCS #11 (security)

pipnss.properties has a peculiar set of limitations for a few strings: once encoded to UTF-8, they need to fit a 32 or 64 bytes buffer. Turns out we had 264 errors in our localizations, accumulated over 15 years!

A bug has been filed for each of the 71 affected languages, and within 24 hours we were already under 180 errors. Thanks for the quick response!

Incorrect number of plural forms

Plural forms in Firefox and Firefox for Android are obtained using a hack on top of .properties files (plural forms are separated by a semicolon). For example:

#1 tab has arrived from #2;#1 tabs have arrived from #2

English has 2 plural forms, one for singular, and one for all other numbers. The situation is much more complex for other languages, reaching up to 5 or 6 plural forms.

In Russian the same string has 3 forms, each one separated from the other by a semicolon:

С #2 получена #1 вкладка;С #2 получено #1 вкладки;С #2 получено #1 вкладок

It looks like several languages have an incorrect number of plural forms, or a completely wrong plural rule. You should have seen bugs if your locale is affected, or fixes directly in Pontoon if the mistake was easy to identify (e.g. a closing extra semicolon).

What’s new or coming up in mobile

Did you notice that Firefox iOS v10 came out, with many more languages added? Come check it out here if you haven’t! Languages added are: Afrikaans (af), Bosnian (bs), Spanish Argentina (es-AR), Galician (gl), Armenian (hy-AM), Interlingua (ia), Khmer (km), Kannada (kn), Malayalam (ml), Odia (or), Punjabi (pa-IN) and Sinhala (si).

If you see that your language is incomplete you can get involved and help! Just reach out to Delphine.

Focus iOS and Android should get a new release some time next week! V4 is right around the corner, and will offer a ton of cool new features. If you don’t have Focus yet, you can find the iOS version here and the Android one here. While usually on a two week release schedule, Focus will take some end of year vacations and come back in January. This means Focus localizers will also have some time off too 🙂

What’s new or coming up in web projects

Mozilla.org project is finally taking a break! This is after a few weeks of mad rush leading up to the Firefox Quantum launch to add a few more new pages and revisions. Thanks to all of you who have been part of this journey, keeping the site to date despite the tight schedule! Mozilla.org site has gone through quite a transformation since the release of the new branding guideline. The logos, color schemes and palettes, layout, and navigation menu all went through major changes. Content style and tone had a major shift to correspond to the visual update. Since June, you have localized and reviewed about 10,000 words, in 20+ new, replacement, and updated pages.

During the “quiet” period, there will be some cleanups in the backend, so obsolete pages will be permanently removed from the dashboards. There might be small updates here and there as a result of the cleanup. Keep an eye on the dashboard for these non-urgent changes.

If you are still catching up with the updates, use the webdashboard for pending projects in your locale.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

On the campaigns side, the Foundation is currently focused on the fundraising and the *Privacy Not Included campaigns.

For fundraising, we should be sending 2 or 3 more emails in December, you should see them appear on the webdashboard. Thanks a lot for all the work you’ve already done for fundraising so far, you’ve helped us a lot! We would be in a far worse position without your help.

This week we’ve worked with the snippets and product teams to launch an improved version of the snippets in Firefox Quantum, making them a bit more prominent and adding back the donate form. Hopefully more people will notice your work and donate eventually!

We are also doing some video testing in English and German, kudos to Michael for his quick help.

Newly published localizer facing documentation

A new document is available with basic instructions on how to use Bugzilla for localizers.

Events

We held a Localization Workshop in Kolkata on November 18-19. Here are a few blog posts about this event from Drashti, Bala and Selva.

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]: Since Quantum launch on Nov 14, and not counting the default onboarding messages all users see when they start 57, so impressions and clicks that have been made possible by L10N are much higher than the numbers below reflect: As of Dec 2nd, non-EN snippets generated 355,676,300 impressions (WOW!) Over 40,000 clicks. Contributors have helped Mozilla raise over $50,000 fundraising dollars, and we expect this number to be much higher by the end of year. Fundraising snippets were mostly turned off between Quantum release and Giving Tuesday.

[Firefox Rocket]: Launched in Indonesia since Nov 7, the install number between in the four-week period was 100,930.

Friends of the Lion

Huge congratulations to Rodrigo Guerra, Carmelo Serraino, and the other members of the Interlingua team for doing an outstanding job in localizing Firefox. Target for Firefox desktop release is 59. The mozilla.org site is already live on production!

Latgalian is also moving to Beta and Release with Firefox 59. Thanks to Dainis for taking over translation ownership, and Raivis from the Latvian team for helping to kick-start it.

Vietnamese is moving to Beta and Release on Firefox Android and riding the 59 train as well. Congratulations to the team who worked hard on testing and making sure the app is in impeccable shape!

Bengali (from Bangladesh) and Nepali will be in the Firefox Android 58 release coming up next Jan. Congratulations on this achievement!

Wolof shipped with Firefox Android 57. Congrats to this small team that does an incredible effort each time!

Thanks to Hari Om Panchal, from the Gujarati team, for doing a great job, translating almost 2 thousand strings in a short period of time.

Thanks to the whole Malayalam team for reviving their localization effort after a long hiatus.

Kudos to all the teams that started cleaning up their bugs in the Mozilla Localization product, without forgetting all those that were already keeping a close eye on their queue.

Thanks to Stoyan of the Bulgarian community for identifying issues in AMO and pushing for product changes to make it more localizer friendly. The AMO developers will start this discussion at the All Hands.

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.

Please note that there will be no January l10n report as this is going to be a quiet month (for once) at Mozilla. Happy end of year holidays to those of you that celebrate it!