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!

After a quick pause in July, your primary source of localization information at Mozilla is back!

New content and projects

What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

As localization drivers, we’re currently working on rethinking and improving the experience of multilingual users in Firefox. While this is a project that will span through several releases of Firefox, the first part of this work already landed in Nightly (Firefox 63): it’s a language switcher in Preferences, hidden behind the intl.multilingual.enabled preference, that currently allows to switch to another language already installed on the system (via language packs).

The next step will be to allow installing a language pack directly from Preferences (for the release version), and install dictionaries when user chooses to add a new language. For that reason, we’re creating a list of dictionaries for each locale. For more details, and discover how you can help, read this thread on dev-l10n.

We’re also working on building a list of native language names to use in the language switcher; once again, check dev-l10n for more info.

Quite a few strings landed in the past weeks for Nightly:

Pages for certificate errors have a new look. To test them, you currently need to change the setting browser.security.newcerterrorpage.enabled to true in about:config. The testing instructions available in our documentation remain valid.

There’s a whole new section dedicated to Content blocking in preferences, enabled by default in Nightly.

What’s new or coming up in mobile

It’s summer time in the western hemisphere, which means many projects (and people!) are taking a break – which also means not many strings are expected to land in mobile land during this period.

One notable thing is that Firefox iOS v13 was just released, and Marathi is a new locale this time around. Congratulations to the team.

On Firefox for Android front, Bosnian (bs), Occitan (oc) and Triqui (trs) are new locales that shipped with on current release version, v61. And we just added English from Canada (en-CA) and Ligurian (lij) to our Nightly v63 multi-locale build, which is available through the Google Play Store. Congratulations to everyone!

Other than that, most mobile projects are on a bit of a hiatus for the rest of the month. However, do expect some new and exciting projects to come in the pipeline over the course of the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more information!

What’s new or coming up in web projects

AMO

About two weeks ago, over 160 sets of curated add-on titles and descriptions were landed in Pontoon. Once localized, they will be included in a Shield Study to be launched on August 13. The study will run for about 2 months. This is probably the largest and longest study the AMO team has conducted.

The current Disco Pane (about:addons) lists curated extensions and themes which are manually programmed. TAAR (Telemetry Aware Add-on Recommender) is a new machine-learning extension discovery system that makes personalized recommendations based on information available in Firefox standard Telemetry. Based on TAAR’s potential to enhance content discovery by surfacing more diversified and personalized recommendations, the team wants to integrate TAAR as a product feature of Disco Pane. It’s called “Disco-TAAR”.

The localized titles and description will increase users’ likelihood to install and install more than one. To be part of this study, you need to make sure your locale has completed at least 80% of the AMO strings by August 12.

Common Voice

Like many of you, the team is taking a summer break. However, when they come back, they promise to introduce a new home page at the beginning of next month. There should be no localization impact.

There are three ways to contributing to this project:

Web part (through Pontoon) Sentence collection Recording

We now have 70 locales showing interest in the project. Many have reached 100% completion or close to it. Congratulations to reaching the first milestones. However, your work shouldn’t stop here. The sentence collection is a major challenge that all the teams face before the fun recording part can begin. Ruben Martin from the Open Innovation team addresses the challenges in this blog post. If you want to learn more about Common Voice project, sign up to Discourse where lots of discussions take place.

What’s new or coming up in Foundation projects

August fundraising emails will be sent to English audience only, the team realizes a lot of people, especially Europeans are gone on holidays and won’t be reading emails. A lot of localizers should be away as well, so they decided it was best to skip this email and focus on September fundraiser.

The Internet Health Report team has started working on next year’s report and is planning to send a localized email in French, German and Spanish to collect examples of projects that improve the health of the internet, links to great new research studies or ideas for topics they should include in the upcoming report.

As for the localized campaign work, it is slowing down in August for several reasons, one of them being an ongoing process to hire two new team members to expand the advocacy campaigns in Europe: a campaign manager, and a partnership organizer. If you know potential candidates, that would be great if you could forward them these offers!

That being said, you can expect some movement on the Copyright campaign towards the end of the month as the next vote is currently scheduled on September 12th.

What’s new or coming up in Pontoon

File priorities and deadlines

The most critical piece of information coming from the tags feature is file priority. It used to be pretty hard to discover, because it was only available in the rarely used Tags tab. We fixed that by exposing file priority in the Resources tab of the Localization dashboard. Similarly, we also added a deadline column to the localization dashboard.

Read-only locales

Pontoon introduced the ability to enable locales for projects in read-only mode. They act the same as regular (read-write) locales, except that users cannot make any edits through Pontoon (by submitting or reviewing translations or suggestions, uploading files or performing batch actions).

That allows us to access translations from locales that do not use Pontoon for localization of some of their projects, which brings a handful of benefits. For example, dashboards and the API will now present full project status across all locales, all Mozilla translations will be accessible in the Locales tab (which is not the case for localizations like the Italian Firefox at the moment) and the Translation Memory of locales currently not available in Pontoon will improve.

Expect more details about this feature as soon as we start enabling read-only locales.

Translation display improvements

Thanks to a patch by Vishal Sharma, translations status in the History tab is now also shown to unauthenticated users and non-Translators. We’ve also removed rejected suggestions from the string list and the editor.

Events

The Jakarta l10n event has taken place last weekend with the local community. Some of the things we worked on include: localizing Rocket browser in Javanese and Sundanese, localizing corresponding SUMO articles, refining style guides… and much more!

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)

Accomplishments

Common Voice

Many communities have made significant progress in the third step: donating their voices. In July, recording were made in the following languages and more.

33 hours English

60 hours Catalan

30 hours Mandarin

24 hours Kabyle

18 hours French

14 hours German

9 other languages at < 10 hours

For the complete list of all the languages, check the language status dashboard.

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.