Almost a couple of years ago I started working on a concept called string tiers. The goal was twofold: on one side help locales, especially those starting from scratch, to prioritize their work on a project as large as Firefox, with currently over 11 thousand strings. On the other hand, give project managers a better understanding of the current status of localization.

Given the growth in complexity and update frequency of Developer Tools within Firefox (currently almost 2,600 strings), finding a solution to this problem became more urgent. For example, is a locale in bad shape because it misses thousands of strings? The answer would not automatically be ”yes”, since the missing strings might have a low priority.

The string tiers concept assigns priority to strings based on their target – who is meant to see them – and their visibility. The idea is quite simple: a string warning the user about an error, or requiring an action from them, is more important than one targeting developers or website owners, and buried in the Error Console of the browser.

If you’re interested in knowing more about string tiers, the full document is available here.

In the past few months the Pontoon team – Ryan and Matjaz in particular – has been working hard to implement the back-end for supporting string tiers. Since the system can be used for more than just priority, we decided to use a more generic term: tags. Translation resources – files in the case of Firefox, not individual strings – can be associated to one or more tags.

A dashboard is available in each localization page, for example for the German localization of Firefox:

At a glance you have access to all the information you need: the priority associated to a tag, its translation status and latest activity. You can use the progress bar to access the strings, for example to translate missing strings or review suggestions, but note that tags are also available in filters.

Pontoon’s documentation is already up to date with information about tags.

Project managers can now see the overall translation status of each tag, but also a breakdown with the status of each locale for a specific tag.

This is a brand new feature, and required a lot of code changes in Pontoon. If you find bugs, or want to add features, feel free to file a bug.